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!
I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Bazaar Sprint back in March, mostly thanks to Canonical sponsoring my entire trip across the globe
The sprint was interesting in all sorts of ways, and it got me working on several projects (some of which I’ll talk about in future posts), but there was one in particular that amazed me how fast it was put together. Bzr-upload.
It all started one night, while sitting across the table from Vincent Ladeuil, the guy who basically wrote transports in Bazaar, and I started complaining about how I had to work around bazaar to make it fit into my daily work flow (doing web development).
The problem was simple: bzr doesn’t update the working tree (the actual files) remotely, so there was no simple way for me to upload the websites I worked on a daily basis.
Long story short, Vincent asked some questions, sat down, wrote tests, wrote code to work with those tests (TDD, FTW), and after some fiddling, we can now upload websites (and anything else, actually) using bzr’s knowledge of what we’ve changed, and it’s solid transport libraries (ftp, sftp).
So… how does this work? Simple.
Assuming you already have bzr installed, fire up a terminal and do: bzr checkout lp:bzr-upload ~/.bazaar/plugins/upload
Now that we have the plugin installed, go to the branch containing your website, and with a simple: beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
No uploaded revision id found, switching to full upload
Uploading bar
Uploading foo
Done!
Did more work?
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr ci -m'Random bug fix'
Committing to: /mywebsite/
modified foo
Committed revision 2.
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload
Using saved location: sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
Uploading foo
That’s it!
bzr-upload will remember the last revision you uploaded, and make sure it only sends what you’ve changed.
Congratulations to all the Canonical folks to helped with the move (I hear John and Elliot had a lot to do with it in particular), and welcome MySQLers
I’ve just finished watching the short film sponsored by the Blender Foundation, and I really have to say, it just feels better and better being in the open source world.
It’s an amazing production, both in the quality of the rendering, sound, and amazing idea behind it.
The official site is currently down due to heavy digging and such, but I happen to have the torrent link stored, so here’s a direct link to it, and, the embedded YouTube version (if you read through the planet, you might have to click to the post to watch it).
It’s licensed under Creative Commons, so besides being encouraged to share it, you can download all the original material used for it and all the tools, for free.
I’ve just kicked off a wiki page to follow up on the state of Integration into IDEs, so, if you want a specific IDE worked on, or are currently working on an integration, please feel free (or encouraged even) to add it to the wiki page: http://bazaar-vcs.org/IDEIntegration
I hope that page eventually harbours enough information for any random person to land on it and find out if their favourite IDE currently works with bazaar, or enough information to start working on one.
It occurred to me that many people couldn’t attend the last bzr sprint, and having missed out on other conferences myself, I know how discouraging it can be left out of the action
Anyway, a great wiki page was setup with everything that was discussed, and who’s going to work on what, so feel free to sign up yourself to the bits you are interested, and get in touch with the rest of the folks to coordinate efforts.
