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Taking a break

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. In the last weeks I had to realise more and more that I need a long break from everything. I therefore decided to move on from Canonical, take some time off, wander the world, recharge my batteries, come back and surprise you all with what’s next.

I’m very much leaving on good terms and I could imagine I won’t be too far away (I’d miss all you great people who became good friends way too much). Having been with Canonical for 11 years and 12 years in the Ubuntu community, it has been an incredibly hard decision to take. Still it’s necessary now and it’ll be good open myself up again to new challenges, new ways of working and new sets of problems.

It was a great privilege to work with you all and be able to add my humble contribution to this crazy undertaking called Ubuntu. I’m extremely grateful for the great moments with you all, the opportunities to learn, your guidance, the friends I made around the world, the laughs, the discussions, the excellent work we did together. This was a very important time of my life.

In the coming weeks I will be without internet, I haven’t quite decided yet, which part of the world I’m going to go to, but maybe I’ll post a picture or two somewhere. 🙂

I also haven’t lined up a new job yet (it’s a question many already asked me). If you have crazy new ideas of what I should work on next, I’m obviously all ears. Drop me a comment or drop me a mail, just note that I might be unresponsive for some time as I’m going to sit on top of a mountain, get lost in the jungle or the desert somewhere.

(My last day at Canonical is Dec 15, so if you have anything to sort out and discuss, let me know and we’ll figure it out.)

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Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day

ucaday-64pxIt’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. Without people like Sujeevan Vijayakumaran (in the case of UbuCon Europe), we as a community, wouldn’t be able to get together, learn from each other and have fun together. It takes a set of special skills to organise big and small events, plan ahead, talk to various people and companies, organise sponsors and helpers and it’s something we often take too much for granted.

Thank you everyone who organised the Ubuntu events I’ve been to over the years, no matter if it’s the small meetings in a bar or the crazy big events, like UDSes (thanks Claire, Marianna and Michelle!). You are incredible rockstars and I had some of my best times thanks to you!

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Ubuntu Online Summit from a snap perspective

Ubuntu Online SummitEarlier 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. During his keynote he gives an overview over what the team has been working on in the last time and explains which features all landed in the snap world recently. It quickly gives you an idea of the pace of development and the breadth of new features which landed.
  • Creating your first snap
    This is a session I gave. Unfortunately Didier couldn’t make it as he had lost his voice in the days before. We both worked together on the content for this. Basically, if you’re new to using and creating snaps, watch this. It’s a series of very simple steps you can follow along and gives you enough background to see the bigger picture.
  • Snap roadmap and Q&A
    This was a fun session with Michael Vogt and Zygmunt Krynicki. They are also both lead developers of snapd and they share a lot of their thoughts in their own very fun and very interesting way. After some discussion of the roadmap, they dived right into the almost endless stream of questions. If you want to get an idea of what’s coming up and some of the more general decisions behind snaps, watch this one.
  • Building snaps in Launchpad
    Colin Watson gave this demo of a beautiful new feature in Launchpad. Starting from a github repo (the source could live elsewhere too), the source is pulled into Launchpad, snaps are built for selected releases of Ubuntu and selected architectures and directly pushed to the store. It’s incredibly easy to set up, complements your CI process and makes building on various architectures and publishing the snaps trivial. Thanks a lot for everybody’s work on this!

The other sessions were great too, this is just what I picked up from the world of snaps.

Enjoy watching the videos and share them please!

Thanks a lot to all the session leads as well!

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Ubuntu Online Summit coming up 15-16 Nov

Ubuntu Online Summit

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!

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Writing snaps together

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.

Many of the first issues new snaps ran into were solved by improvements and new features in snapd and snapcraft. If you are still seeing a problem with your snap, we want you to get in touch. We are all interested in seeing more software as snaps, so let’s work together on them!

Enter the Sandpit

I mentioned it in my last announcement of the last Snappy Playpen event already, but as we saw many new snaps being added there in the last days, I wanted to mention it again. We started a new initiative called the Sandpit.

It’s a place where you can easily

  • list a snap you are working on and are looking for some help
  • find out at a glance if your favourite piece of software is already being snapped

It’s a very light-weight process: simply edit a wiki and get in touch with whoever’s working on the snap. The list grew quite quickly, so there’s loads of opportunities to find like-minded snap authors and get snaps online together.

You can find many of the people listed on the Sandpit wiki either in #snappy on Freenode or on Gitter. Just ask around and somebody will help.

Happy snapping everyone!

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Get your software snapped tomorrow!

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.
  • We landed quite a few high-quality snaps in the store.
  • We had lots of fun.

Opening the Sandpit

With our next Snappy Playpen event tomorrow, 20th September 2016, we want to extend the scheme. We are opening the Sandpit part of the Playpen!

One thing we realised in the last weeks is that we treated the Playpen more and more like a place where well-working, tested and well-understood snaps go to inspire people who are new to snapping software. What we saw as well was that lots of fellow snappers kept their half-done snaps on their hard-disk instead of sharing them and giving others the chance to finish them or get involved in fixing. Time to change that, time for the Sandpit!

In the Sandpit things can get messy, but you get to explore and play around. It’s fun. Naturally things need to be light-weight, which is why we organise the Sandpit on just a simple wiki page. The way it works is that if you have a half-finished snap, you simply push it to a repo, add your name and the link to the wiki, so others get a chance to take a look and work together with you on it.

Tomorrow, 20th September 2016, we are going to get together again and help each other snapping, clean up old bits, fix things, explain, hang out and have a good time. If you want to join, you’re welcome. We’re on Gitter and on IRC.

  • WHEN: 2016-09-20
  • WHAT: Snappy Playpen event – opening the Sandpit
  • WHERE: Gitter and on IRC

Added bonus

As an added bonus, we are going to invite Michael Vogt, one of the core developers of snapd to the Ubuntu Community Q&A tomorrow. Join us at 15:00 UTC tomorrow on http://ubuntuonair.com and ask all the questions you always had!

See you tomorrow!

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Need helping getting started with snapping?

Are you interested in snapping software and need help?

snapcraft-website

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).
  • Multiple release channels in the store.

If you’re intrigued but need help to get started, tomorrow is a great time for this, as we’re going to have another Snappy Playpen event.

Tomorrow (13th Sept 2016) we are going to hang out on Gitter and IRC and will be there to answer your questions, work on snaps together and have fun!

In the Snappy Playpen project we are collecting best-practices and work on getting snaps out there together. We’re a friendly bunch and look forward to meeting you!

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Snapcraft workshop at Akademy

I’m looking forward to next week, as

Going-To-Akademy-2016On Wednesday I’m going to give this workshop

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. The whole process offers many things upstreams and app publishers have been asking for years.

The workshop is interactive, all that’s required is that you either have VirtualBox or qemu installed or run any flavour of Ubuntu 16.04 or later. I’m going to bring USB sticks with images.

The workshop will consist of three very straight-forward parts:

  • Using the snap command to find, install, remove, update and revert software installations.
  • Using snapcraft to build and publish software.
  • Taking a look at KDE/Qt software and see how it’s snapped.

A few words about your host of the session: I’m Daniel Holbach, I have been part of the Ubuntu community since its very early days and work for Canonical on the Community team. Right now I’m working closely with the Snappy team on making publishing software as much fun as it should be.

See you next Wednesday!

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Snappy Playpen event tomorrow!

Snapcraft

Over the last few weeks, Tuesday has become the Snappy Playpen day. Although you can find us on IRC and Gitter all the time basically, Tuesday is where many of us have their eyeballs locked on the discussion and are happy to help out.

We’re making no exception tomorrow, 19th July 2016 will be another Snappy Playpen event.

It’s beautiful to see all the recent additions to the Snappy Playpen repository and other contributions. Just check out the snapcraft social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) to get an idea.

We very much want to continue down that road: get more software snapped, help newcomers, get snapcraft.yaml files submitted upstream, fix documentation, answer questions, and grow together as a community.

Tomorrow will have the great advantage, that most of the people working on snapd and snapcraft are sprinting in Heidelberg right now. So they are all in the same place physically, so we are going to try to talk them into helping out and joining us for some Playpen activity.

To get started, have a look at the snapcraft.io page and ask us all your questions tomorrow! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.

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Snappy Playpen event tomorrow!

Distributing software has never been easier. snapcraft makes it easy to build any kind of app, snapd and snap-confine bring security and hassle-free updates. Maintaining the app in the store is simple and you get lots of flexibility with different release channels.

If you’re interested or curious, adding your software to the Snappy Playpen, might be a good first step. Tomorrow, Tuesday 12th July 2016, we are working together on getting more snaps landed, getting things improved, updating our docs, helping out the snapd/snapcraft people, and upstreaming snaps.

It’s easy to get in touch, we are both hanging out in

We are looking forward to seeing you there.