People

Today marks another Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, one of Ubuntu’s beautiful traditions, where you publicly thank people for their work. It’s always hard to pick just one person or a group of people, but you know what - better appreciate somebody’s work than nobody’s work at all. One person I’d like to thanks for their work is Michael Hall. He is always around, always working on a number of projects, always involved in discussions on social media and never shy to add yet another work item to his TODO list....

… was probably written across my face when I first got involved in Ubuntu and contributed my first patch. I wasn’t quite sure if I had followed the right procedure or if anything else was wrong, but luckily I found a lot of very friendly people who helped me out and got my contribution in. That was almost 8 years ago. Today it’s a lot easier. There is good documentation, there are more consistent processes and better tools....

I’ve been using Google+ Hangouts for a while and some of you might have seen that Jono posted some evidence of these. Mostly I just used them for team calls with a fixed agenda or to keep in touch with friends. Yesterday I did a free-for-all hangout, using the new “named hangout” feature of Google+. It’s basically like a chat room with a fixed URL, where you can discuss whatever is on your mind....

One thing I love about Ubuntu is that Ubuntu fans and contributors are spread around the whole globe. So when I started planning holidays in Morocco it was almost certain that we’d meet somebody from the LoCo team there. When I let everyone know about my plans, Adnane Belmadiaf immediately came up with dozens of ideas what I could go and visit in his country. For those who don’t know Adnane, he is one of the heroes behind many of our Ubuntu web projects, for example the LoCo Team Portal, Summit or cloud....

Don’t you love it when you get contributions to your project when you didn’t expect them at all? By reaching out to contributors, thanking them and welcoming them to the Ubuntu community you do a lot to encourage them and help them integrate into your team more quickly. Generally I feel this is part of our culture already. Discussions at UDS indicated what we probably could do better is: do this even more, try to be more personal, talk about it more, because it encourages others and motivates others who might still be a bit unsure about getting their feet wet, generally talk more about what we’re doing and what’s going on, to explain where you need help....

Today is Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, which is excellent. It’s the first time we do it and from now on 20th November will be a day to remind ourselves that Ubuntu is put together by humans and not “fabricated somewhere”. The human aspect of Ubuntu was what instantly won me over in 2004. This comes in multiple facets: From a product point of view, that computers stopped being dull and grey boxes, but devices I use to interact with the people I care about....

If you lack context, here you go.

You don’t see me blogging about things outside the Ubuntu world very often. OK, an occasional mixtape every now and then or some holiday pictures, but I generally try to stay away from topics such as politics or things that happen in the world elsewhere. This is not because I don’t care or don’t have an opinion - it’s quite the opposite. I just prefer to not get drawn into huge arguments about who’s right and I try to avoid writing about and singling out particular events and miss to mention others....

From left to right: Jorge, me, Jono, Ahmed, David. (Picture by the unstoppable Graham Binns.) Update: there’s more pictures.

As part of the Ubuntu Development videocast, I had the great pleasure of interviewing Jani Monoses, Michael Vogt and Oliver Grawert yesterday. We are all together here in Dallas and I successfully managed to drag them out of meetings and away from work and talk to them about Ubuntu Development and how they got involved. Unfortunately we kind of messed this up. Up until 8 minutes, 10 seconds you will only be able to see us gesturing, there’s no sound....

As I mentioned earlier, today I’m working with Ara, Matthias, Michael and Yaiza at Büro 2.0 and we just finished a very funny video cast together. Matthias ‘doko’ Klose made sure to arrive AFTER the video cast was done, but rest assured he can not evade. In recompensation he brought Father Christmas hats, so to you here’s from the Canonical Berlin team: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Normally I would’ve done the next video cast next week, but with slowly approaching Christmas everybody has probably better things to do than watching Daniel rambling on about Ubuntu Development. So we’ll instead do the “Christmas special” this week. Tomorrow, 16th December, 12:00 UTC. This time I won’t be sitting at home in front of bookshelves, but I’ll be at Büro2.0, Berlin’s fantastic Open Source coworking place. I’ve been working from there for about a year now and I love it....

I’m incredibly happy with how the patch pilot programme is working out. We’ve been making steady progress at reducing the number of items up for review. Looking at the sponsoring queue there are still a few older items that we should clear out. I’m convinced it would make us feel better about the state of things and make it easier for us to stay on top things. Old patches often don’t apply any more, require more work, etc....

In last week’s videocast we talked about “getting set up” for Ubuntu Development. Everybody had a gpg key, ssh key, all the tools, a pbuilder and settings in Launchpad sorted out afterwards, which was great. If you want to have a look at the video again, you can do so. Up until now I didn’t find a good way to show links/terminal output yet. Are there any suggestions to do this in a better way?...

Thursday, 9th December at 16:00 UTC* I’ll be online with another installment of “Ubuntu Development with Daniel Holbach”. If you haven’t seen the last session yet, I’d encourage you to do so, it was an introduction to Ubuntu Development. This time we’ll talk about getting set up for Ubuntu development. I’ll show you how to install all necessary tools configure them correctly introduce yourself to the Ubuntu infrastructure On ustream there’s a chat window next to the video, but you can only participate in the discussion if you sign up....