On the more extreme side, there is test driven development (TDD). You write the tests first, watch them fail, and then start producing the code that will get them to pass. Having co-authored bzr-upload with the TDD-obsessed bzr developer, Vincent Ladeuil, I thought that if I was going to add a new feature, I may just as well try it (again).

It rocked.

I set up the test, my carrot, and the task went from “start poking around code” to “fix this problem”. With the test written, it became very clear what parts of the code I needed to change, and how the feature had to work.

The results?  in one hour, I implemented a feature that lets you ignore specific files on upload. With tests.

To ensure we didn’t loose any of the conversation, he took notes and sent them to me, so now I’m passing them on for those of you interested in contributing or just knowing what features are in the pipeline.
* Create a .bzr-upload-ignore file that ignore any action for which one the paths matches an ignore regexp. Use the working tree version by default, fallback to the versioned one otherwise

* New command: “bzr upload-files FILES” to allow uploading individual files. Upload the specified files if no uncommitted
changes exist, –force overrides the uncommitted changes check.

* New command: “bzr upload-check”. Walk the remote site ensuring that every file still has the same content that the local version –restore optionally restore the remote content to the local value. Optionally for remote sites implementing ssh and providing an md5 binary, the check can be implemented by comparing the local and remote md5 avoiding the full downloads.

In the mean time, Charline Poirier, who is in charge of user testing in our team, has created another survey with 5 more icons to help us get more data. If everyone could give this survey another spin, and create some networking effects to help spread the survey to non-Launchpad users, it would be tremendously helpful to us. Here’s the link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=6iwthaIT4FwPCsMPa1EDEA_3d_3d

The Canonical User Experience team has set up a survey to gather information on how users see our icons, so if you have a few spare minutes (it’s very quick!), please take the survey and pass it on to other people, especially if they don’t use Launchpad, as they will be less biased.

Survey is available at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8hXmjrmFS7TmQCjh7jJB_2bQ_3d_3d

Mark Shuttleworth really deserves a lot of praise for this bold and brave move, open sourcing not only the code, but all  it’s history. It’s a fantastic day today.

Update: yes, fully means including soyuz and codehosting, Mark has decided to release everything. The whole history is there.

See the loggerhead page:

It’s a pretty cool website, so I’m very happy they now support projects I actually work on

I kicked off an import of Loggerhead’s history, and in less than a day, it was up and working.

Kudos to the ohloh team!

So, I thought it would be useful to provide information for the dozen of people who land here every day 

If you want to work for Canonical, check out the employment page, it always has the latest job offers: http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/
Among many other things, my team is currently looking for awesome people to join the User Experience Team, the coolest place to be today 

As for what it’s like to work at Canonical, here’s my take on it:
At this point, it’s been a little over five months since I started working full time, although I was doing some contracting work before that, and I’ve been around the Ubuntu and bzr community for ages, so I already knew a lot of the people before joining.
One of the coolest things for me is that the way most of the company works, is basically the same as your typical open source project: mailing lists, irc, distributed, and filled with passionate people. If you have an open source background, the transition should be pretty seamless. Coming from other companies may take a little bit of getting used, but you know how it is, “your mileage may vary“.
The Ubuntu-like atmosphere where everybody is extremely nice and respectful seems to span across the whole company as well. This was especially surprising to me considering that everyone is astonishingly smart, and have done amazing things I had read (and still do!) on news sites for years. My experience is that when too many smart people are together, it’s a much more cut-throat competitive environment. Here, it is not. You could sit down and have a fantastic and interesting dinner with anyone in the company (I’ve shared meals with dozens of different people, and it’s held up true every single time).
On the technical side, all the teams are constantly revising and improving work flows and tools, pushing towards the cutting edge by adopting all kinds of lean and agile development strategies, while still being very much test-driven. What can be more appealing to a developer than that?
Finally, there are so many interesting projects being worked on at the same time, it’s often very hard to keep up with what’s happening. Personally, I believe that the balance between open source development and projects developed in-house as services or for third parties, plays a very big part in making everything happen so fast a two-hundred-and-something people size the company. It’s amazing how so many people are payed to work full time on directly on free software, directly interleaved with the community.

So, as you can guess, my recommendation is that if you ever get the chance to work for Canonical, take it, it will almost certainly be a fulfilling experience.

As part of the release, I have also uploaded packages to the bzr PPA: https://launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive
My intention is to keep doing that in releases from now on  

It has also been rolled out to Launchpad, so you will see nicer URLs like: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~loggerhead-team/loggerhead/trunk/annotate/head:/serve-branches
Quick changelog:

- Fixed some performance issues (Robert Collins, James Westby, Martin Albisetti)
- Update loggerhead to work with bzr 1.10 and the latest bzr-search (Robert Collins)
- Add startup deamon script for Linux (Marius Kruger)
- Switch navigation from file_ids to paths. Fixes bugs #260363, #269365 and #128926. (Martin Albisetti)
- Fix bug #258710 (“the /files page explodes in an empty branch”). Also minor improvements to the /files and /changes pages. (Marius Kruger)
- Added –port, –host and –prefix options to serve-branches script. (Martin Albisetti)
- Fixed broken template for project browsing with start-loggerhead (Martin Albisetti)
- Added –reload options to restart the application when a python file change. (Guillermo Gonzalez)
- Added error handling middleware. (Guillermo Gonzalez)
- Fix bug #243415 (“Tracebacks go to console but not log file”). Also minor improvements to logging in serve-branches and start-loggerhead. (Guillermo Gonzalez)