development

For some time we have had training materials available for learning how to write Ubuntu apps. We’ve had a number of folks organising App Dev School events in their LoCo team. That’s brilliant! What’s new now are training materials for developing scopes! It’s actually not that hard. If you have a look at the workshop, you can prepare yourself quite easily for giving the session at a local event. As we are working on an updated developer site, right now, for now take a look at the following pages if you’re interested in running such a session yourself:...

The Ubuntu Developer Advisory Team has been in place for two or three release cycles already and it’s been a fun journey so far. We’ve got in touch with many many new contributors and old contributors as well. If you don’t know what this team does, here’s what our wiki page has to say: We Reach out to new contributors, thank them for their work and get feedback. Reach out to people who might be ready to apply for upload rights and help them....

If you track the Packaging Guide page very closely, you will have noticed it already. We have the main piece of Ubuntu Development instructions available in English Spanish Russian now, which is just fantastic. Months of hard work were translated and some small issues sorted out by the unstoppable Dmitry Shachnev. Without his outstanding help, in translations, the guide itself, in Debian and upstream, this wouldn’t have been possible. But also a giant “Спасибо всем!...

I mentioned the upcoming Ubuntu Developer Week in my last blog post already, but I thought I’d mention a couple more great sessions we are going to have during the event. If you haven’t read the original post yet, here’s the quick details: running from 29th to 31st January 2013 we are going to have sessions, mostly on IRC, some on Hangouts-on-Air, where you get a introduction to all kinds of topics surrounding Ubuntu Development....

The times for Ubuntu have never been more exciting. Cloud, server, desktop, laptop, TV, tablet, phone - everything runs Ubuntu or is soon going to. This makes developing Ubuntu very special, because fixes which go into Ubuntu in one place will benefit all form factors and all circumstances where it’s used. By improving Ubuntu you make millions of people around the globe happy. During every 6 month release cycle we run Ubuntu Developer Week....

We have achieved a huge milestone in the development community. For years we wanted translatable packaging and development documentation. It’s there. If you head to http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/ you can see the following: The Ubuntu Packaging Guide (Spanish) – would you like to learn how to package or become an Ubuntu Developer? Here’s a comprehensive, topic-base guide that explores and describes the main concepts of packaging. It is available as a single HTML page (Spanish), a PDF document (Spanish), or in EPUB format (for eBook readers) (Spanish)....

Our Ubuntu Development Hangouts have had guests every now and then, but we wanted to get more people on board to talk about what’s going on in Ubuntu development. Many of our viewers asked for more detailed information about specific topics. So here’s what we’re up to in the next weeks (we’ll add more dates and more sessions): 4th Dec 2012, 15:00 UTC: Rick Spencer, Vice President of Ubuntu Engineering at Canonical will talk to us about 13....

It’s time for some Ubuntu Development Events for those of you who are raring to go get started for 13.04 development. We will be starting the fun today at 13:00 UTC with Ubuntu Open Week. Luckily I still managed to book a double session, so we’ll have plenty of time to get you started and introduced to Development team and what we do. The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) will be happening form 29th October to 1st November in Copenhagen and we will have some workshops there as well....

I’m quite happy with the progress the Packaging Guide is making. We managed to fix a bunch of bugs this cycle and most importantly we got it into Ubuntu and made it translatable. We only opened translations a couple of weeks ago, but some language teams have been hard at work: pt_BR.po (18%) ja.po (14%) ru.po (9%) es.po (5%) id.po (4%) de.po (4%) nl.po (1%) sv.po (0%) fr.po (0%) lv.po (0%)...

We need some feedback. Can you please leave a comment with the information you wish you had had heard when you got involved with Ubuntu development you want to share with new starters in Ubuntu development you learnt and found invaluable As you can imagine, your feedback is going to make the experience for new contributors even better. Thanks a lot in advance.

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....

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....

Congratulations everyone, we got a fantastic LTS release out, some of the reactions of our users you can see here. Well done! :) At the same time understandable, but also worrying is the look at our sponsoring page. Silently with all the release freezes in place, the number of open sponsorship items has crept up to ~70 again. If you are an Ubuntu developer or can help out with reviewing patches, please head to the sponsoring queue and help out....

Jono blogged about the importance of application developers to Ubuntu earlier and I wanted to echo some thoughts and add some of my own. I have been in the Ubuntu Developer camp for most of Ubuntu’s life as a project, so the mindset of “App developers? Why don’t they just set up an open source project and get it packaged?” or “Apps? We have packages.” is what I have heard a couple of times already and is what I would probably have answered some years ago myself....

One class of new contributors has always been successful: self-starters who knew what they wanted to do, where to get involved, with possibly some already existing experience or knowledge. For others it’s been a tougher ride. To remedy some of this, we set up the Developer Advisory Team. We figured that (among other things) reaching out to new contributors who just got their first fix into Ubuntu to thank them, encourage them and ask for their feedback would help us a lot in terms of bringing them into the fold and finding out what current stumbling blocks are....