The five minute introduction to Ubuntu development

I talked many times about getting involved with developing Ubuntu and how it can seem daunting and that there’s much to learn. When I talked to contributors who had reached the critical point where they understood what they can do, who they can talk to and how the processes roughly work, most of them said that three things helped them to get to the point: the documentation, talking to the people, code reviews.

Some of you might remember when Andrew Starr-Bochicchio send out the Developer Advisory Team’s analysis of the feedback new contributors gave us. It was a great read, told us a lot about how new contributors get involved, but it was a also quite a bit of work. As we conducted most of our interviews via mail, we had lots of answers in our inbox. As a team, we put them into a Google Doc and after the release cycle had passed, we had amassed 6 months worth of feedback.

This morning I woke up and found the sponsoring queue at 103 items! I mailed the ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-motu lists and the current count is down to 81. This is great, but I’m sure we can get it down to 0. Jani Monoses also filed these bugs to discuss how we can improve our sponsoring strategy: Bug #1008449: explicit forward-to-debian tags? Bug #1008445: Support for blacklisting packages Bug #1008441: Allow grouping by contributor You might want to join the conversation.