Help Launchpad get better icons
We're trying to improve the icons we have in Launchpad so they're more usable across different cultures and types of users, and our first step is to do some user testing on our current icons.
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
Launchpad is now fully open source
As promised, Launchpad has been fully open sourced (as opposed to the initial idea, nothing has been held back). Get it now, fix your favorite pet bug, and improve tens thousands of people's experience.
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:
User Experience everywhere
About a month ago, I went to Canonical's office in London for a sprint, and made good use of my Sunday by visiting the National Gallery. One fantastic thing about London, is the fact that all museums are free, not just because otherwise a few years back I couldn't of afforded going, but because the fact that they are free gives you the freedom of going to the same ones over and over again, and just calmly visit the bits you're interested in.
As I was walking by, I saw a painting that really struck me. It was a terrible and dark dragon eating two men, one of them is in agony while it's face is being eaten off. Quite shocking:
After looking at it for a little while, I went closer to read the description of it, which unexpectedly shocked me ten times as much:
"This gruesome episode comes from the story of Cadmus which is told in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (III: 1-151). Cadmus was sent by the Delphic oracle to follow a cow and build a town where it sank from exhaustion. The cow stopped on the future site of Thebes, and Cadmus, intending to sacrifice it, sent his followers to get water from the neighbouring well of Ares. They were killed by the guardian of the well, a dragon who was the son of Ares. Cadmus then killed the dragon and on the advice of Athena sowed its teeth in the ground, from which sprang up armed men who slew each other, with the exception of five who became the ancestors of the Thebans."
This got me thinking on how much first impressions are important in the user experience, but really hit me how much more important the actual content is. We tend to relay the content creation and management to "the marketing folks", when I feel it's a crucial part that should be worked on together to balance off the amount of text, with the tone in which it's written, and to ensure that we're adding value to the users' experience.
Yes, I'm starting to see UI everywhere.
Working at Canonical, 5 months later
A week ago I started going through my blog's logs, and realized that I'd had a jump in visits from Google. Digging a little bit deeper into it, I realized that a lot of people seem to be searching for "working at canonical" phrased in different ways. From what I can gather, it's split up into two groups: people who want to find a job in Canonical, and people who are considering a specific role and want to know what it's like.
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.
Working at Canonical
So, some of you already know, and some of you, including myself, will be a bit surprised.
Starting Monday, I'm going to start working full time for Canonical.
I've been active in the Ubuntu community since very close to the beginning, then jumped to working on Bazaar and surrounding projects, which, btw, has one of the greatest community ever. So, working for Canonical is like going to Disneyland
I've been doing some contracting work on my free time (mostly for Loggerhead, which turned out great, and some UI in Launchpad), and things just got more exciting every day, until at some point things just started speeding up, and I got offered to work full time a few weeks ago. Having sorted out the remaining details yesterday, Monday is officially my first day.
I'm going to stop working actively as a lead developer at my company, have found some very qualified people to take over the work I've been doing, and I'm going to fully focus on making user interfaces mind-blowingly good.
I'll also get to continue working on Loggerhead as part of my job, so expect to see the improvements to keep on landing regularly.
I'm really excited to start working full time with the smartest people in the world, doing a job that has the word revolution in it's description!
Update: see what happened 5 months later