Happy meerkats

Get your Ubuntu 10.10(.10) here!

During my holidays I made it, among other beautiful stops, to the wonderful city of Esfahan.

While I was there, Software Freedom Day was being celebrated at the University of Esfahan. I met Ehsan Shahrokhi a day earlier and he gave me the opportunity to give a brief talk at SFD.

Like all the other experiences I made in the country, it was absolutely fantastic. Everybody was incredibly welcoming, everybody was extremely friendly, very helpful and just wonderful.

I loved the atmosphere there. Everybody was trying hard to contribute something good to the Open Source world. There was a large Ubuntu following and there were people of other parts of the wider community, but there was no bickering, complaining or distro, flavour, editor, or desktop environment wars going on.

Apart from that dedication there were two other things that really impressed me:

1. The percentage of women. There were at least 40%-50% of women in the audience. It was just fantastic to see much more women participating than in any other places as I had seen up until now.
2. How the event in Esfahan attracted people from all over the country. There were people who drove there from Mashhad, from Tehran and other places. Take a look at a map and see how far it is.

In just one day I made lots of new friends in Esfahan who are all determined to bring something good to the world. People who welcomed me in an incredibly friendly, hospitable way and with lots of good humour. Thanks a lot everybody!

It was easy to promise to come back one day again.

Jorge and Allison blogged about their mentors and start into the Open Source world and I thought it would be a great way to thank at least some of the people who helped me get started. So I started thinking about who all helped me out in one way or the other in the last few years and I realised that there’s incredibly many people I should’ve been thanking years ago already.

• One person has constantly been there for me in the last 6 years: Michael Vogt. I got to know him in Dortmund, the city where we both studied. We quickly became good friends and although we now almost live 700km apart we stayed in touch and talk on the phone every second day. What I love about Michael is that he’s pragmatic, modest, thoughtful and generally a lot of fun. I’m incredibly glad he helped me out like he did.
• Sébastien Bacher was the first person I worked with on a daily basis. Luckily he was very patient with me and explained lots of packaging details to me. We both grew up close to the Franco-Allemande border, which probably was the reason why we instantly got on very well. We laughed a lot when working together.

There’s dozens of other people who helped me out, got me thinking and changed how I saw things, but I’ll probably save them for future blog posts.

Today it’s been almost exactly five years since I’ve been with Canonical and six years in the Ubuntu community. Everybody was fantastic to me and still is. Thanks a lot also to other folks who were there for me in the early days (Oliver Grawert, James Blackwell, Jane Fraser, and loads and loads of others).

You know who you are and thanks a lot for the time with you.

In the first weeks when I started contributing to the Ubuntu community about six years ago, I was constantly amazed at a number of things:

• how friendly, encouraging and motivating people were: in a very short time I made lots of friends, people who are always there for me and I’d always be there for (extended family – kind of)
• how much I learned in a very short period of time (a state of constant “a-ha! moments”)
• the incredibly strong sense of opportunity: “if I fix this bug, I not only fix it for myself, but for millions of users”

After a few months I helped out new contributors myself, answered questions and tried to give them a similar experience as I had. Learning to do something great by experiencing it first hand. The great thing is that a lot of contributors already went ahead and became involved in upstream projects and Debian.

I’m extremely grateful I’m in a position where I can do this as part of my job.

I’ve been working on a few things in the last time that will hopefully give even more people that sense of opportunity and that sense of achievement soon. Please note that all of the items below are just happening because of “a little help from my friends”, I couldn’t have possibly pulled this off all on my own.

• Daily Builds documentation and testing: with Jorge Castro and others I went through the process of getting Daily Builds up and running, we documented it, found issues, reported them and thought about how it would make most sense to package maintainers, upstreams and users. So we set up a knowledge base as well, that should help upstreams and package maintainers to figure out when a daily builds makes sense, how to sell it to their users and what kind of preparation ios necessary.
• Harvest: I had the extreme pleasure of working with Dylan McCall on Harvest this cycle. It was an awesome experience. He chose Harvest as his Summer of Code project and directly dived into the hardest things first: instead of fixing small things here and there, he implemented a great user interface that’ll be great to use. I did quite a bit of code-review and fixed a bunch of bugs myself. It’s soon in a state where it can be deployed. With Harvest out there, it will be a lot easier to find things that need doing, get a good overview of outstanding work regarding a few packages you might care about and coordination/cooperation might actually be easier too.
• LoCo Directory: Starting from a vague idea we first just set up a place where LoCo teams could register themselves, then we added team events and then started making it pretty. At times I was hacking a lot on it, at other times doing lots of code reviews, but I’m very glad to see that more and more people are starting to help out and implementing their ideas and visions into it. It’s an amazing project and hopefully helps LoCo teams to coordinate their work and make people interested in Linux and Ubuntu open source enthusiasts and contributors by giving them that great first experience.
• Lots of Sponsoring/Code Review: I still feel this is the best way to help out new contributors on their way. By explaining how things are done (also when to better get stuff upstream first), how to do them better and guide them on their way to commit access/upload rights, you do Ubuntu and Open Source a great service. Make people feel welcome, help them out, by having a good experience with the process of fixing problems for millions of people you get contributors hooked up forever.
• Operation Cleansweep: Speaking of patches and code review: we have a huge backlog of patches that didn’t follow the process and need to be reviewed and forwarded to Debian and Upstream. The team reviewed heaps of patches and I was glad to be part of the initiative. I helped with the documentation, organisation of events and reviewed a couple of bugs myself. This is an awesome way to get involved and immediately make the whole open source world benefit.

There’s quite a lot of other things where I could be helpful too to keep the ball in the Ubuntu community rolling: as member of the Community Council I do bits of organisation here and there, within Canonical I often answer questions about Ubuntu development processes to new starters and development-unrelated teams, I helped organising the Ubuntu Global Jam, Ubuntu Developer Week and other events, thankfully found a team to take over the “Behind MOTU” interviews, helped with the organisation of Ubuntu’s participation in Google’s Summer of Code, that plus calls, heaps of mails, small and big arguments keep me quite busy.

I feel very privileged being in this position and hope I’m instrumental to the open source world at large. One thing’s for sure: I still immensely enjoy it.

If you have followed my blog and what I’ve said elsewhere you might have noticed, I’m TOTALLY looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam.

The Ubuntu Berlinians will meet in Berlin’s c-base on 29th August from 12:00 to 18:00. Please come and join us!

Original announcement below:

Freie Software lebt vom Mitmachen und das ist gar nicht so schwer, wie
man vielleicht erwartet. Zum vierten Mal ruft Ubuntu zum "Global Jam",
bei der weltweit helfende Hände an einem Tag gemeinsam an der
Verbesserung der freien Linux-Distribution Ubuntu arbeiten. Gesucht
werden dafür nicht nur technisch versierte Entwickler, sondern alle
Nutzer, die Fehler aufspüren, melden und prüfen wollen, Übersetzer, die
Software in andere Sprachen übertragen oder die Dokumentation
überarbeiten möchten.

Für alle diese Schritte gibt es einfache Softwarelösungen, die einem
viel Arbeit abnehmen und den Einstieg erleichtern. Alles was man braucht
ist also: etwas Zeit, die Fähigkeit, englische Texte zu verstehen und
Lust, einmal etwas an die Gemeinschaft zurückzugeben.

Bei einem Jam arbeitet man gemeinsam an einem Ort, hilft sich
gegenseitig bei offenen Fragen und Einstiegshürden und hat dabei
übrigens nicht wenig Spaß.

Der Berliner Teil des Ubuntu Global Bug Jams wird am 29. August von
12 bis 18 Uhr in der c-base stattfinden.

Da die c-base im Moment keine Desktoprechner zur Verfügung stellt,
sollten ein Notebook mitgebracht werden. Weitere Informationen gibt es
auf http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/265/detail/.

Adresse der c-base:
Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin
U-/S-Bahnhof Jannowitzbrücke

Anfahrt zur c-base:
http://wiki.c-base.org/coredump/AnfahrtsSkizze
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_1.png
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_2.png

If you haven’t registered your Ubuntu Global Jam event yet, do it now!

Definitely going!

As you all know loads of teams around the globe meet this weekend and do great Ubuntu and Open Source work together. Ubuntu Jams are all about making Ubuntu and the open source world in general rock even harder. No matter which part of it you’re interested, be it Translations, Testing, QA work, Packaging, Docs or anything else, we want you to have fun with your local team!

I personally will join in on the fun in Berlin (announcement coming up soon) and will try to put a bit of work into Operation Cleansweep, a great initiative to get our backlog of patches under control. As you can see from this week’s report, it could do with getting some love:

Total bugs with patches: 2196 (-37)
Reviewed patches: 420 (+11)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 99 (+5)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 177 (+3)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 62 (0)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 39 (-2)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 56 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 10 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 18 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 3 (0)

If you’re interested in reviewing patches, check out the review guide and help the reviewers team out.

Guess who has all registered for the fun already:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Birmingham, UK
• Novosibirsk, Russia
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Caldes de Montbui, Spain
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Managua, Nicaragua

Lots of other teams are discussing their events right now. We in Berlin will definitely be part of the fun.

András Bognár also worked on new Ubuntu Global Jam badges:

Awesome! Let your friends know! Get planning! This will be a weekend full of awesomeness!

I wanted to follow up on Jorge’s great blog post for a longer while already. He said:

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories[…]

Needless to say: Jorge is spot on!

A lot of people have been doing ROCKing work in the last few weeks and I never took the time to thank them:

• Dylan McCall has been doing amazing work on Harvest. (Dylan wrote about it too.) Harvest came a long way from a nice idea about aggregating packaging/fixing opportunities in Ubuntu and thanks to Dylan’s great work as part of his Google Summer of Code project arrived in the 21st century. We had lots of ideas at the last UDS (spec1, spec2) but instead of fixing small bits and pieces here and there, Dylan took on the harder job: giving Harvest a nice, consistent and usable interface. I’ll be a very happy man once we deployed it and it’s in active use. Dylan is great to work with: a great attention to detail, still pragmatic and a great sense of humour.
• The LoCo Directory hackers! It’s just amazing to see what people who are excited about the LoCo world manage to pull off. Lots of bugs fixed, lots of nice fixes got in. It’s a pleasure to work with everybody. Every time I reviewed a piece of code I learneed something new.
• Sponsors! A big big hug to people who review code for newcomers who can’t directly commit to Ubuntu themselves yet. The Hall of Fame currently lists these folks, who did a lot of sponsoring: Stefano Rivera, Benjamin Drung, Sebastien Bacher, Didier Roche, Timo Aaltonen, Jonathan Riddell, Martin Pitt. If you can, help out!

Seen in Berlin…

Next Ubuntu Bug Day will be all about Operation Cleansweep, which as you all know deals with reviewing patches and forwarding them to our Upstream partner projects.

Make sure you join #ubuntu-reviews and #ubuntu-bugs on next Thursday (2010-08-12). It will be a great time to get involved in Ubuntu!

Stats from last week (we can do a lot better, so join us on Thursday and get involved!):

Total bugs with patches: 2286 (-27)
Reviewed patches: 379 (-9)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 94 (+1)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 163 (-5)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 51 (-2)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 41 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 49 (-3)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 16 (+1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

UGJ - I'm going!

I’m SO looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam. Up until now we have 4 events registered:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Caldes de Montbui, Catalonia, Spain

and I talked to a number of people already who are planning additional events. This will be SWEET!

While there’s numerous activities you can dive into on a Jam event, I’d love to see a lot of work being put into Operation Cleansweep. If dealing with patches is nothing new to you, you’d do Ubuntu and the broader open source community a huge favour.

Here the Cleansweep stats of last week:

Total bugs with patches: 2313 (+30)
Reviewed patches: 388 (+10)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 93 (+3)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 168 (+4)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 53 (+2)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 42 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 52 (+2)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

… also known as Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up swiftly, so make sure you put 27th-29th August into your calendar and talk your local Ubuntu friends into participating.

Ok, so it’s Ubuntu Global Jam. What does that mean? What’s going to happen?

Simple. It’s going to happen what you make happen. Whatever your team enjoys doing is great. The only requirements are: it needs to be fun and it should make Ubuntu better somehow.

Ok. What does that mean?

We had loads of different jams around the world already: events where people get together locally and make Ubutnu better by working on bugs, packaging, translations, documentation, testing, upgrading or whatever else they enjoy doing.

In the past we had events all around the globe, where new friends met for the first time, people learned from each other, people from other open source projects were invited and where everybody (most importantly) had a fantastic time.

If your LoCo team already knows when and where it’s going to happen, add the event to the LoCo Directory. We set up the event on loco.ubuntu.com already.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Jams has lots of information on how to to organise the event properly, and what kind of preparation your team mates should look into depending on what your team wants to do. Stay tuned for tuition sessions where you can ask all your questions. A good place for getting that information is of course loco-contacts or ubuntu-event-planners.

If you’re part of a LoCo team, please bring it up with your team, talk to them, find out what they like, meet and make Ubuntu rock even harder.

And the last day of Ubuntu Developer Week is over now too. It’s a shame, but when can we do… watch out for the next one in half a year. In the meantime, there’s going to be a bunch of Packaging Training sessions as well, and Ubuntu Open Week, so it’s not like you’ll be twiddling thumbs the whole time.

Let’s re-cap Day 5:

• 16:00 – 18:00 UTC: Django And You (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic. He did a great job explaining the concepts behind Django, how to set up a basic project, lots of tips and tricks and what I liked best: he plugged the LoCo Directory a couple of times. Hope you’ll get interested and see how great Django is and how much fun projects like the Loco Directory are.
• 18:00 – 19:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream (jcastro): Jorge was the best possible person to talk about one of the most awesome projects we have in the Ubuntu landscape: the essence of Adopt-An-Upstream is to be a tie between the Ubuntu project and others projects: you take on real responsibility by sharing information, by helping others making informed decisions and improve Ubuntu in a very real sense. Great session!
• 19:00 – 20:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu (highvoltage): I’m glad we had Jonathan Carther with us who talked about Edubuntu, how it’s set up, how the team works and what the plans for the future are. Great!
• 20:00 – 21:00 UTC: Me, myself and QA (warp10, gaspa): Last sesion of the day and of whole UDW was about how to help with Quality Assurance in Ubuntu: basically making packages rock harder. Easy tasks, how to find them, what various terms like NBS mean, was all part of the session. Thanks a lot to the Ubuntu Italian Mafia Famiglia (no that name is not my invention ).

Again I’d like to thank everybody for helping out with making Ubuntu Developer Week rock as hard as it did. 350+ attendees, 25 sessions, lots of covered topics and everything happened in a very seamless fashion. Awesome. Thanks again!

Make sure to check out the logs if you’re interested in anything particular, they’re all on the wiki.

Day 4 of Ubuntu Developer Week is over and it’s a bit sad to see UDW draw to a close again. On a happier note: all the sessions yesterday were awesome. Let’s recap together:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less. Seems like he was very happy about the session himself, the audience even forgave him to try to make French the official language of Ubuntu Development.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening (vish): Vishnoo did a great job explaining the Hundred Papercuts project and what it is about. Participation was great and I can already see lots of people getting involved in the project. It indeed is a great way to improve Ubuntu in an evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts (ttx): Thierry Carrez was up next and his session about Server Papercuts was a great follow up to the Hundred Papercuts session. If you’re interested in server stuff, like making things work again, read up the session log. He explained quite well who to talk to, how to get in touch with the same and make Ubuntu servers rock even harder.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu (charlie-tca): As Xubuntu project lead, Charlie Kravetz has a lot of insight into Xubuntu and XFCE. Heaps of good questions, lots of interest in Xubuntu made the session fly by quickly. If you’re interested, get in touch with Charlie!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge Proposals: Life On The Sunny Side (beuno/mhall119): Unfortunately Martin Albisetti got ill and could not give the session, but luckily Michael Hall jumped in to run a Q&A session on merge proposals. We might repeat the session in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

So today is the last day of UDW. I know you’re as sad as I am, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy the last day. Here’s why:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Django And You – mhall119
  • Description: Michael Hall will run a double session about everybody’s favourite Web Framework. Django is a great way to build a dynamic website very easily. Sit back, relax and enjoy a session from one of the very busyLoCoDirectory hackers.
• 18:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream – jcastro
  • Description: Jorge Castro is back again and will tell you how to adopt-an-upstream: how to take care of the one project you’re deeply interested in and make Ubuntu users and the upstream project even happier.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu – highvoltage
  • Description: Edubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Jonathan Carter will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Me, Myself And QA – warp10, gaspa and BlackZ
  • Description: Andrea Colangelo , Andrea Gasparini and Lorenzo de Liso are not only all from Italy, but are also deeply interested in making Ubuntu applications shine. How to take a package and make it rock from a quality assurance point of view is their topic. Join in and help to make Ubuntu rock!

Ubuntu Developer Week is not just amazing as always: this time it’s even better. The sessions are great, there’s loads of interesting details that were talked about but what’s even more important: we have loads of people attending who ask great questions and the first are already jumping in there and work actively on Ubuntu. That’s exactly what gives Ubuntu Developer Week it’s unique feel. I LOVE IT!

Yesterday was Day 3, so for those of you who did or could not attend, here’s what happened:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep And Reviewing Patches (nigelb and bobbo): Nigel Babu is spearheading an initiative which has the goal that there’s no unreviewed patches left by the end of it. To achieve that we set up a process that’s very easy to follow and involves QA people, Ubuntu developers, Upstream and Debian developers. Nigel and David Futcher did a fantastic job talking about the effort. Make sure you join in on the fun!
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs And Patches Upstream (pedro_ and nigelb): Pedro Villavicencio Garrido is one of the best people to talk about evaluating bug reports and patches and being in touch with loads and loads of upstream developers about them and thus forwarding valuable information to software authors. His session was very informative, up to the point and it seems like there’s going to be even more people hanging out in #ubuntu-bugs soon.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You (jcastro and dholbach): Jorge Castro and I talked about Daily Builds afterwards. This is a very exciting new technology in Launchpad that is currently in Beta stage. If you want up-to-date software you care about out there and users using and testing it, read the log. I think Jorge and I were sounding something between a comedy duo and an old couple every now and then – I hope you forgive us.
• 19:00 UTC: Make Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators (tedg): Ted Gould has been working on indicators in the panel for quite a while now and it was great to have him around to explain what’s going on and how to make best use of the technology. If your heart beats for Desktop stuff, you wrote a Desktop application or just want to know what’s going on and how things are evolving, make sure you check out the log.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage (JFo): Imagine there’s millions of users using all kinds of different hardware. Imagine there’s failure reports or some kind of hardware not working exactly. How do you deal with the feedback of those users? This is exactly that Jeremy Foshee talked about. As you can imagine there’s a lot of lessons the Kernel team learned already and lots of experience that went into the session. If you like all things hardware and want to give Jeremy a hand, be sure to check out the log.

As always: thanks a lot everybody who makes Ubuntu Developer Week happening. You know who you are and you’re awesome!

Day 4 starts in just a few hours, so here’s what’s happening today:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly – didrocks
  • Description: If you ever had a great idea for an application that makes the life of users easier and didn’t want to waste hours of getting everything set up, you’ll be absolutely right here. Didier Roche will show you how to get it done quickly.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening – vish
  • Description: All you got is an Evening of Love for Ubuntu? Vishnoo will show you how to make an impact in just one evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts! – ttx
  • Description: Thierry Carrez works hard making the Ubuntu Server experience even smoother than it already is. Helping with Server papercuts is a great and easy way to get involved in Ubuntu Server development, so if you’re interested and would like to help out, be there!
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu – charlie-tca
  • Description: Xubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Charlie Kravetz will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge proposals: life on the sunny side – beuno
  • Description: Martin Albisetti will talk about merge proposals, how they work, why they make your code better and how you can easily learn more by using them.

Hope to see you there and please help spread the news!

Jim Campbell did a great job in putting together a survey about our packaging guide. If you used the guide in the past, like it, and/or want it improved, please check out his announce.

Another day of Ubuntu Developer Week has passed and what a great day it was. Let’s re-cap:

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging Like A Ninja (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well. He gave an excellent overview over translations and how to work with them and answered what felt like a thousand questions.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML (Riddell): As a seasoned KDE-hacker Jonathan Riddell knows what’s going on in the KDE and Qt world and which technologies get you good results quickly. He gave great insight into making your KDE apps rock very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian (Laney and Rhonda): Wow, what a great session. I’m particularly excited to see people from Debian and Ubuntu collaborate like that and see that much interest in getting the most out of our work for both projects. Great session, lots of info, lots of good questions.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard (zyga): The last session of the day was held by Zygmunt Krynicki who presented an interesting way to see how low-level changes affect the whole system and measure performance. The questions indicate that there’s a deep interest in solving this problem across the board.

Again, I’d like to thank everybody who made this day a success.

We have Day 3 ahead of us, so let’s see what’ll happen today:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep – Reviewing Patches – nigelb and bobbo
  • Description: Operation Cleansweep is in full swing, the goal is to review around 2000 patches and help to push them into the right direction. Nigel Babu will give a session that will explain very easily how to help with this fantastic initiative.
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs and Patches Upstream – pedro_
  • Description: This session together with the one before will give you all the tools to effectively help Ubuntu, Debian and other upstream projects. Pedro Villavicencio will deliver this session and has great experience: he does a great job working primarily with the GNOME project.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You – jcastro and dholbach
  • Description: Hold tight for Jorge Castro’s session about the latest piece of awesome of our Launchpad infrastructure. Daily Builds will change how we interact with projects a lot because it helps to bring the latest awesome to testers and enthusiasts very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: Making Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators – tedg
  • Description: Application Indicators clean up the panel and are easy to use. Find out how to use them in your application for a great user experience.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage – JFo
  • Description: Interested in the core parts of Ubuntu that make hardware work? Jeremy Foshee will take you on a tour through kernel wonderland and show you how to help out.

AWESOME!

What a fantastic start of Ubuntu Developer Week. At times we had 350+ visitors and the amount of great questions was simply overwhelming. Awesome. I also noticed the first few participants actively helping out after the sessions. This makes me incredibly happy.

So here’s a re-cap of day 1:

• 16:00 UTC – 18:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran. So many great questions, so much fun and so much topics covered. Thanks a lot everybody. We managed to set up an initial Ubuntu development environment, talk about Ubuntu development processes and Ubuntu in the bigger picture. In the second part we had a look at a couple of packages that fail to build and succeeded in fixing a few of them. Awesome!
• 18:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC: Widgetcraft (apachelogger): Next up was Harald Sitter who did a great job explaining how to write KDE widgets by using the Plasmoid infrastructure. Lots of real-life examples, lots of excitement and slides for your reading pleasure.
• 19:00 UTC – 20:00 UTC: Desktop Team Overview (seb128): Sébastien Bacher did a great presentation of what’s going on in the Desktop Team and how you can help out. Maybe we should have an additional “Ask Séb” session, next time. Heaps and heaps of interested Desktop people kept him quite busy.
• 20:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs (slangasek): Last on day 1 was Steve Langasek who dived deep into Upstart’s features and how to make best use of them. I foresee lots and lots of good use made of it.

Thanks a lot to everybody who helped to make Day 1 such a success. Awesome!

So what’s cooking for Day 2 you ask?

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging like a Ninja – shadeslayer
  • Description: The Kubuntu team has lots of ninjas on their team. Rohan Garg is one of them and will show you how to join the team.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» – dpm
  • Description: If you’ve heard yourself saying exactly that at least one time, Translations Mastermind David Planella is here with the remedy: one hour of translations goodness.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML – Riddell
  • Description: Jonathan Riddell will bring you up to scratch with the latest goodness for developing Qt applications. Qt Quick and QML will bring a lot more fun to your life.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian – Laney and Rhonda
  • Description: Debian is the most important project to Ubuntu. Being able to work effectively with Debian will make your life easier. Iain Lane knows this quite well and will give an excellent session about this. Rhonda from the Debian Project will round it up with some comments looking from the other side at it.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard – zyga
  • Description: Zygmunt Krynicki will talk about a tool he is writing for Linaro and how to make use of it in other places. Dashboard is a tool for visualizing results from unit tests and performance benchmarks. Dashboard can be applied virtually everywhere where performance or regression monitoring is required.

Totally looking forward to it!

… it’s Ubuntu Developer Week time!

Starting from 16:00 UTC today, we’ll have one week of awesome sessions revolving around development, packaging, hacking and in general making Ubuntu better.

I’m very excited for the event to kick off, so let’s see what day 1 has for us:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development – dholbach
  • Description: As always we’ll start the week with a session on how to get you started. In this session Daniel Holbach will get you set up, talk about helpful tools and make sure you get the big picture overview first.
• 18:00 UTC: Widgetcraft – apachelogger
  • Description: Ever wanted to create your own amazing Plasma Widget? Now is your chance! Harald Sitter will show you how to create such a magical program and how to get your own fan club.
• 19:00 UTC: Desktop Team overview – seb128
  • Description: Sébastien Bacher will talk about how the desktop team is building your favorite desktop, what the common tasks are that the team is working on and what you could do if you want to contribute as well
• 20:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs – slangasek
  • Description: As you all might’ve heard upstart is Ubuntu’s init system for quite a while now. Upstart offers a bunch of nice features, which you can easily make use of, after Steve Langasek showed you how.
  • Preparation: Skim the init(5) manpage and bring your questions with you

I hope to see you all there and be sure to tell your friends!

Probably due to the soccer championship or the hot weather in some countries we had a slow week last week. Here’s the quick report:

Total bugs with patches: 2263 (-1)
Reviewed patches: 331 (0)
---
Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 86 (+1)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 133 (+6)
Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 41 (+1)
Bugs with 'indicator-application': 44 (-1)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 47 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 13 (0)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (+1)
Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 1 (0)

… which means: we need your help. Instructions are available and a warm welcome in #ubuntu-reviews certain.

Operation Cleansweep: Progress

Also: watch our for Nigel’s session at Ubuntu Developer Week about Operation Cleansweep on Wednesday 14th July at 16:00 UTC.

Only a few days left until Ubuntu Developer Week! I’m really excited and hope you tell all your friends to come there too!