Blogs

I’m very much looking forward to GitOps Days 2020 on 20th/21st May (next week). It will be a great opportunity to learn more about GitOps concepts and tools, see demos, ask questions, have a great time and meet other people who are in the space as well. We have some excellent speakers lined up (and are still adding a few more): Kelsey Hightower (Google) Javeria Khan (Palo Alto Networks) Kyle Rockman (Under Armour) Carlos Sanchez (Adobe) Taylor Dolezal (Independent) Cornelia Davis (Weaveworks) Vuk Gojnic (Deutsche Telekom) Alexis Richardson (Weaveworks) Stefan Prodan (Weaveworks) Register at https://www....

Time flies when you’re having fun: it’s now been two years since I started working at Weaveworks and I 💕 the experience it’s been. Back then I was just concluding my sabbatical and had started pursuing a second career in that year. So my mind wasn’t exactly in the tech space, still I felt rested and open to new challenges. In the meantime, many old friends had already waved over from Cloud Native land and tried to lure me there....

First of all: thanks Dennis Marttinen and Lucas Käldström for helping write this up. It’s been only a bit over a month since Weave Ignite was announced to the world (others talked about it as well). Time to catch up on what happened in the meantime, the team around it has been busy. If you’re new to Weave Ignite, it’s an open source VM manager with a container UX and built-in GitOps management (check out the docs)....

Long time no blog It’s been a busy half a year since my last blog post. Immersing myself in the cloud native world and my non-work related training kept me quite busy. I learned quite a lot and it’s been a very rewarding experience, but whenever I thought “hey, I should blog about this”, something else came up which grabbed my attention. This time I wanted to get the word out about a fun project I was involved in and reflect a bit on some aspects of these last six months....

After years of using Thinkpads, I went for a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu. Although I had bought devices with Linux pre-installed and laptops for friends as well, this was going to be my first own laptop coming with Ubuntu straight from the factory. The hardware The specs looked great (big SSD disk, enough memory to play around with VMs/containers, etc.), but I had to brush away some fond memories of old laptops, where I was able to easily replace parts (memory, screen, disk, power jack, keyboard and more for my x220)....

My sabbatical is over and today is my first day working at Weaveworks where I’m joining the Developer Experience team. I’m incredibly excited about this. I got to know quite a few of my colleagues in the past weeks and they were without exception all incredibly likeable and smart people. The company believes in open source, is quite diverse and has an office in Berlin - also I’ll get to work with Cezzaine, Jonathan and Steve again....

Since many of you reached out to me in the past weeks to find out if I was still travelling the world and how things were going, I thought I’d reconnect with the online world and write a blog post again. After a bit more than a year, my sabbatical is coming to an end now. I had a lot of time to reflect, recharge batteries, be curious again, travel and make new experiences....

It’s a bit strange to write this blog post in the same week as Martin Pitt is announcing moving on from Canonical. I remember many moments of Martin’s post very vividly and he was one of the first I ran into on my flight to Sydney for Ubuntu Down Under in 2005. Fast forward to today: 2016 was a year full of change - my personal life was no exception there....

It’s 20th November 2016, so today marks another Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day. The idea for the event was put together by Ahmed Shams in 2011 and it’s simple but brilliant: once a year (at least), take the time to thank some specific people for their work in Ubuntu. As I’m at UbuCon Europe this weekend, it’s incredibly easy to pick somebody whose work I’m grateful for. Today I’d like to thank all the event organisers in the Ubuntu world....

Earlier this week the Ubuntu community was busy with the Ubuntu Online Summit. If you head to the schedule page, you can watch all the sessions which happened. As I’m interested in snaps a lot, I’d like to highlight some of the sessions which happened there, so if you missed them, you can go back and see what happened there: Intro and keynote by Gustavo Niemeyer Gustavo (amongst others projects he is involved with) is one of the lead developers of snapd....

Ubuntu Online Summit is here again! 15th and 16th November 2016 we are talking about the great stuff which landed in Ubuntu 16.10 and we talk about our plans for 17.04. Now is the last call for adding sessions, find out how to do that here. See you all next week!

Working with a new technology often brings you to see things in a new light and re-think previous habits. Especially when it challenges the status quo and expectations of years of traditional use. Snaps are no exception in this regard. As one example twenty years ago we simply didn’t have today’s confinement technologies. Luckily is using snapcraft a real joy: you write one declarative file, define your snap’s parts, make use of snapcraft’s many plugins and if really necessary, you write a quick and simple plugin using Python to run your custom build....

For a few weeks we have been running the Snappy Playpen as a pet/research project already. Many great things have happened since then: With the Playpen we now have a repository of great best-practice examples. We brought together a lot of people who are excited about snaps, who worked together, collaborated, wrote plugins together and improved snapcraft and friends. A number of cloud parts were put together by the team as well....

Are you interested in snapping software and need help? There’s a lot of good reasons for snapping software: You get software out to millions of users: Ubuntu (snapd installed by default since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), snapd available too on Arch, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, openSUSE, openembedded, yocto and OpenWRT. You get to define the experience: ship the stack the way you tested it. Just one simple test-scenario for you. Building a snap is simple (one piece of YAML controls the build), publishing is instantaneous (one command to run, automatic review)....

I’m looking forward to next week, as I’m going to Akademy. On Wednesday I’m going to give this workshop WHAT: Creating snaps with snapcraft MAR 0.017 - Wednesday, 7th September 10:00 - 12:00 So if you are interested in learning how to publish software easily and directly to users, this might be just for you. Snaps are self-contained, confined apps, which run across a variety of Linux systems. The process of snapping software is very straight-forward and publishing them is very quick as well....