As with past years, UbuCon at SCALE was hosted by Nathan Haines and Richard Gaskin. The schedule this year was very reflective about the history and changes in the project. In a talk from Sriram Ramkrishna of System76 titled “Unity Dumped Us! The Emotional Healing” he talked about the closing of development on the Unity desktop environment. System76 is primarily a desktop company, so the abrupt change of direction from Canonical took some adjusting to and was a little painful. But out of it came their Ubuntu derivative Pop!_OS and a community around it that they’re quite proud of. In the talk “The Changing Face of Ubuntu” Nathan Haines walked through Ubuntu history to demonstrate the changes that have happened within the project over the years, and allow us to look at the changes today with some historical perspective. The Ubuntu project has always been about change. Jono Bacon was in the final talk slot of the event to give a community management talk titled “Ubuntu: Lessons Learned”. Another retrospective, he drew from his experience when he was the Ubuntu Community Manager to share some insight into what worked and what didn’t in the community. Particularly noteworthy for me were his points about community members needing direction more than options (something I’ve also seen in my work, discrete tasks have a higher chance of being taken than broad contribution requests) and the importance of setting expectations for community members. Indeed, I’ve seen that expectations are frequently poorly communicated in communities where there is a company controlling direction of the project. A lot of frustration could be alleviated by being more clear about what is expected from the company and where the community plays a role.

UbuCon group photo courtesy of Nathan Haines (source)

The UbuCon this year wasn’t as big as those in years past, but we did pack the room with nearly 120 people for a few talks, including the one I did on “Keeping Your Ubuntu Systems Secure”. Nathan Haines suggested this topic when I was struggling to come up with a talk idea for the conference. At first I wasn’t sure what I’d say, but as I started taking notes about what I know about Ubuntu both from a systems administration perspective with servers, and as someone who has done a fair amount of user support in the community over the past decade, it turned out that I did have an entire talk worth of advice! None of what I shared was complicated or revolutionary, there was no kernel hardening in my talk or much use of third party security tools. Instead the talk focused on things like keeping your system updated, developing a fundamental understanding of how your system and Debian packages work, and tips around software management. The slides for my presentation are pretty wordy, so you can glean the tips I shared from them: Keeping_Your_Ubuntu_Systems_Secure-UbuConSummit_Scale16x.pdf.

Thanks to Nathan Haines for taking this photo during my talk (source)

The team running Ubuntu efforts at the conference rounded of SCALE by staffing a booth through the weekend. The Ubuntu booths have certainly evolved over the years, when I ran them it was always a bit cluttered and had quite the grass roots feeling to it (the booth in 2012). The booths the team put together now are simpler and more polished. This is definitely in line with the trend of more polished open source software presence in general, so kudos to the team for making sure our little Ubuntu California crew of volunteers keeps up.

Shifting over to the more work-focused parts of the conference, on Friday I spoke at Container Day, with my talk being the first of the day. The great thing about going first is that I get to complete my talk and relax for the rest of the conference. The less great thing about it is that I get to experience all the A/V gotchas and be awake and ready to give a talk at 9:30AM. Still, I think the pros outweighed the cons and I was able to give a refresh of my “Advanced Continuous Delivery Strategies for Containerized Applications Using DC/OS” talk, which included a new demo that I finished writing the week before. The talk seemed to generate interest that led to good discussions later in the conference, and to my relief the live demo concluded without a problem. Slides from the talk can be found here: Advanced_CD_Using_DCOS-SCALE16x.pdf

Thanks to Nathan Handler for taking this photo during my talk (source)

Saturday and Sunday brought a duo of keynotes that I wouldn’t have expected at an open source conference five years ago, from Microsoft and Amazon. In both these keynotes the speaker recognized the importance of open source today in the industry, which has fueled the shift in perspective and direction regarding open source for these companies. There’s certainly a celebration to be had around this, when companies are contributing to open source because it makes business sense to do so, we all benefit from the increased opportunities that presents. On the other hand, it has caused disruption in the older open source communities, and some have struggled to continue to find personal value and meaning in this new open source world. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the conference and have started putting together a talk about it, nicely timed for the 20th anniversary of the “open source” term. I want to explore how veteran contributors stay passionate and engaged, and how we can bring this same feeling to new contributors who came down different paths to join open source communities.

Regular talks began on Saturday with me attending Nathan Handler’s talk on “Terraforming all the things” where he shared some of the work they’ve been doing at Yelp that has resulted in the handling of things like DNS records and CDN configuration being handled by Terraform. From there I went to a talk by Brian Proffitt where he talked about metrics in communities and the Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOOS) project. I spent much of the rest of the day in the “hallway track” catching up with people, but at the end I popped into a talk by Steve Wong on “Running Containerized Workloads in an on-prem Datacenter” where he discussed the role that bare metal continues to have in the industry, even as many rush to the cloud for a turnkey solution.

It was at this talk where I had the pleasure of meeting one of our newest Account Executives at Mesosphere, Kelly Bond, and also had some time to catch up with my colleague Jörg Schad.

Jörg, me, Kelly

Nuritzi Sanchez presented my favorite talk on Sunday, on Endless OS. They build a Linux distribution using FlatPak and as an organization work on the problem of access to technology in developing nations. I’ve long been concerned about cellphone-only access in these countries. You need a mix of a system that’s tolerant to being offline and that has input devices (like keyboards!) that allow work to be done on them. They’re doing really interesting work on the technical side related to offline content and general architecture around a system that needs to be conscious of offline status, but they’re also developing deployment strategies on the ground in places like Indonesia that will ensure the local community can succeed long term. I have a lot of respect for the people working toward all this, and really want to see this organization succeed.

I’m always grateful to participate in this conference. It’s grown a lot over the years and it certainly has changed, but the autonomy given to the special events like UbuCon allows for a conference that brings together lots of different voices and perspective all in one place. I also have a lot of friends who attend this conference, many of whom span jobs and open source projects I’ve worked on over more than a decade. Building friendships and reconnecting with people is part of what makes the work I do in open source so important to me, and not just a job for me. Thanks to everyone who continues to make this possible year after year in beautiful Pasadena.

More photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157693153653781

I kept busy on the home front while he traveled, including the meetups and another trip to the California Academy of Sciences I talked about here.

The morning following the Redis meetup at work I had to spend a couple hours taking Caligula to the cardiologist. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but he has high calcium levels according to a few blood tests. They are high enough that they need to be treated before it does damage, so the first order of business is finding out what is wrong. During the diagnostic tests they found an abnormality with his heart. We still don’t know why his calcium levels are high, but we’ve ruled out some of the major issues and now his primary doctor wants to craft a treat-the-symptom plan. But first, she wanted him to see a cardiologist, since typical treatments like SubQ fluids and steroids can impact the heart. Our regular veterinary practice doesn’t have a cardiologist in their rotation, so he was off to SFVS, a hospital we got very familiar with as Simcoe went there routinely for care during her last few years with us, and so we were back again!

In spite of friendliness at home, Caligula is never very charming when he visits the vet. Thankfully, he was on his best behavior this time. The physical exam went fine, and since he was being so chill they figured they wouldn’t have to sedate him for further tests. Great! He was whisked away into the back for an ultrasound preformed by the cardiologist, as well to get his blood pressure checked. The result? He has been diagnosed with mild hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HMC). Right now it’s only noticeable as part of his heart being abnormally thick, but he’s asymptomatic and the only advice was to keep an eye on it with annual checkups. Calcium treatment-wise he gave the green light for any treatment his primary vet orders. Hooray!

With that, and then the rest of my work day, behind me, that Wednesday evening was spent doing an Ubuntu Hour and a Debian Dinner. I hadn’t done either one in over a year. Declining turnout and disappointing attendance at a 16.04 release party last June let me to shift it to the back burner commitment-wise. I wasn’t sure I’d pick it back up again at all. A small BALUG meeting where we talked about the latest Debian release and desire to connect with some Ubuntu folks following some big changes this year (discontinuation of the Ubuntu phone/tablet, shuttering of the Unity project) inspired me to take some time to plan another one. We had 7 people come out across the two back-to-back events, including a couple new folks. This is a high average for these events and I had fun, so I was glad I took the time.

After the meetup I set aside a few minutes to meet one of my neighbors who was giving away an 80 bottle wine rack that seemed like it would suit our condo nicely. Indeed it does! He helped me bring it down and I put it together over the weekend. It’s a massive improvement over the pile of boxes in the corner that the wine had been in previously. I did catalog all our wines (both here in and Pennsylvania) in a spreadsheet recently, but I still had to dig through a bunch of boxes to find the one I wanted.

Aside from setting up the wine rack, I had a pretty chill weekend. I wrote a letter, read a lot. Before he left, MJ raided the Yahoo! company store and picked me up a soft, fluffy purple blanket. It’s perfect for snuggling up and enjoying some reading or TV. It’s also Caligula approved. Sunday was spent in Santa Clara for a conference I write about here. I then took Monday off to make up for the day, something I’m quite proud of myself for doing self-care wise, as I’m prone to work way too much.

During my quick jaunt down to Los Angeles last week I made a quick stop in the tiny Orange County Zoo with my friend Nathan after lunch. It’s a park that specializes in local animals, so the big draws of the zoo included a bear, a bobcat, and various large eagles. It was a pretty hot day, so most of the animals were sleeping through it, but even that was pretty adorable. The bear took advantage of the weather to take a bath, and the opossum sleeping in an Amazon box was pretty much my favorite thing ever. We also took a ride on the super cute, 1:3 scale Irvine Park Railroad before heading back to my hotel to get some work done and prep a demo cluster before the evening Meetup.

My 8:30AM flight home on Thursday morning was early, but the John Wayne airport is small and the trip was uneventful. Finally reunited on Thursday morning, MJ and I immediately ran off to our respective offices for a couple busy work days. Thursday I also had a new monitor delivered at home, an Acer GN276HL bid 27-inch. Both my current 22″ monitors were fine, but they only have VGA and DVI outputs. My current work laptop, which I use while working from home half the time, is the first laptop I’ve had that lacks a VGA port. I played around with DVI-to-HDMI and VGA-to-HDMI but there was an annoying amount of fiddling every time I plugged it in because the auto-detection wasn’t great. As a result, over the past 6 months I’ve left my second monitor dark as I just used my laptop screen at home, on my desk, but it wasn’t optimal. While this monitor doesn’t have crazy impressive resolution like my one at work, the price was right and so far it’s working great.

MJ and I spent the together and playing it pretty low-key this past weekend. Saturday I spent much of the day reading and watching a couple episodes of a show MJ and I watch together. The only event of the day was brunch at the Delancey Street Restaurant, which we’d never been to but was quite good. That was how we found out about the closures of the Muni Metro on weekends and late evenings for a month while they test the new light rail cars. We picked it up at the Embarcadero with dozens of folks headed to the Giants game. A beautiful day, I walked home from the restaurant, stopping at Philz for a coffee to balance out the couple of sour beers (Duchesse de Bourgogne and Petrus Aged Pale) I had with my crab cake Benedict.

Yesterday MJ and I met up with my cousin Keith who is in town for work. We drove down to Sutro’s at Cliff House for a late lunch, then took a drive through Golden Gate Park, then up to Twin Peaks. Unfortunately the fog was obscuring the breathtaking views that can usually be seen from there, but we got a picture together anyway. It was a good afternoon. It had been twelve years since we’d seen each other, and with my big family spread out all over the world this was the first time in our lives we were able to really spend any significant time talking.

Sunday evening was spent tackling some triage on our media and backup servers we keep here at home. Both seemed to have some issues with disks in their RAID arrays and one may have a failing SSD, which stores the operating system. There are some gremlins, but we’ve made some decisions about how we want to move forward. Now to order some drives!

And now another work week! This evening a bunch of us from the office are making our way down to AT&T Park to see a Giants game, which should be pretty fun, it should be a beautiful evening for it.

Well, thanks to Tom Macfarlane of the Canonical Design Team you have one more goodie in your toolkit, the SVG of the official Zapus! It’s now been added to the Animal SVGs section of the Official Artwork page on the Ubuntu wiki.

Download the SVG version for printing or using in any other release-related activities from the wiki page or directly here.

Over here, I’m also all ready with the little “zapus” I picked up on Amazon.

I ducked out of the Open Infrastructure Day in the mid-afternoon to give my talk, 10 Years of Xubuntu. This is a talk I’d been thinking about for some time, and I begin by walking folks through the history of the Xubuntu project. From there I spoke about where it sits in the Ubuntu community as a recognized flavor, and then on to how specific strategies that the team has employed with regard to motivating the completely volunteer-driven team.

When it came to social media accounts, we didn’t create them all ourselves, instead relying upon existing accounts on Facebook, G+ and LinkedIn that we promoted to being official ones, keeping the original volunteers in place, just giving access to a core Xubuntu team member in case they couldn’t continue running it. It worked out for all of us, we had solid contributors passionate about their specific platforms and excited to be made official, and as long as they kept them running we didn’t need to expend core team resources to keep them running. We’ve also worked to collect user stories in order to motivate current contributors, since it means a lot to see their work being used by others. I’ve also placed a great deal of value on the Xubuntu Strategy Document, which has set the guiding principles of the project and allowed us to steer the ship through difficult decisions in the project. Slides from the talk are available here: 10_years_of_Xubuntu_UbuCon_Summit.pdf (1.9M).

Thursday evening I met with my open source infrastructure friends for dinner, but afterwards swung by Porto Alegre to catch some folks for evening drinks and snacks. I had a really nice chat with Nathan Haines, who co-organized the UbuCon Summit.

On Friday I was able to attend the first keynote! Michael Hall gave a talk titled Sponsored by Canonical where he dove deep into Ubuntu history to highlight Canonical’s role in the support of the project from the early focus on desktop Linux, to the move into devices and the cloud. His talk was followed by one from Sergio Schvezov on Snaps. The afternoon was spent as an unconference, with the Ubuntu booth starting up in the expo hall on 2PM.

The weekend was all about the Ubuntu booth. Several volunteers staffed it Friday through Sunday.

They spent the event showing off the Ubuntu Phone, Mycroft AI, and several laptops.

It was also great to once again meet up with one of my co-authors for the 9th edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, José Antonio Rey. Our publisher sent a pile of books to give out at the event, some of which we gave out during our talks, and a couple more at the booth.

The event formally kicked off Saturday morning with a welcome and introduction by Sujeevan Vijayakumaran, he reported that 170 people registered for the event and shared other statistics about the number of countries attendees were from. He also introduced a member of the UbPorts team, Marius Gripsgård, who announced the USB docking station for Ubuntu Touch devices they were developing, more information in this article on their website: The StationDock.

Following these introductions and announcements, we were joined by Canonical CEO Jane Silber who provided a tour of the Ubuntu ecosystem today. She highlighted the variety of industries where Ubuntu was key, progress with Ubuntu on desktops/laptops, tablets, phones and venturing into the smart Internet of Things (IoT) space. Her focus was around the amount of innovation we’re seeing in the Ubuntu community and from Canonical, and talked about specifics regarding security, updates, the success in the cloud and where Ubuntu Core fits into the future of computing.

I also loved that she talked about the Ubuntu community. The strength of local meetups and events, the free support community that spans a variety of resources, ongoing work by the various Ubuntu flavors. She also spoke to the passion of Ubuntu contributors, citing comics and artwork that community members have made, including the stunning series of release animal artwork by Sylvia Ritter from right there in Germany, visit them here: Ubuntu Animals. I was also super thrilled that she mentioned the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter as a valuable resource for keeping up with the community, a very small group of folks works very hard on it and that kind of validation is key to sustaining motivation.

The next talk I attended was by Fernando Lanero Barbero on Linux is education, Linux is science. Ubuntu to free educational environments. Fernando works at a school district in Spain where he has deployed Ubuntu across hundreds of computers, reaching over 1200 students in the three years he’s been doing the work. The talk outlined the strengths of the approach, explaining that there was cost savings for his school and also how Ubuntu and open source software is more in line with the school values. One of the key takeaways from his experience was one that I know a lot about from our own Linux in schools experiences here in the US at Partimus: focus on the people, not the technologies. We’re technologists who love Linux and want to promote it, but without engagement, understanding and buy-in from teachers, deployments won’t be successful. A lot of time needs to be spent making assessments of their needs, doing roll-outs slowly and methodically so that the change doesn’t happen to abruptly and leave them in a lurch. He also stressed the importance of consistency with the deployments. Don’t get super creative across machines, use the same flavor for everything, even the same icon set. Not everyone is as comfortable with variation as we are, and you want to make the transition as easy as possible across all the systems.

Laura Fautley (Czajkowski) spoke at the next talk I went to, on Supporting Inclusion & Involvement in a Remote Distributed Team. The Ubuntu community itself is distributed across the globe, so drawing experience from her work there and later at several jobs where she’s had to help manage communities, she had a great list of recommendations as you build out such a team. She talked about being sensitive to time zones, acknowledgement that decisions are sometimes made in social situations rather than that you need to somehow document and share these decisions with the broader community. She was also eager to highlight how you need to acknowledge and promote the achievements in your team, both within the team and to the broader organization and project to make sure everyone feels valued and so that everyone knows the great work you’re doing. Finally, it was interesting to hear some thoughts about remote member on-boarding, stressing the need to have a process so that new contributors and team mates can quickly get up to speed and feel included from the beginning.

I went to a few other talks throughout the two day event, but one of the big reasons for me attending was to meet up with some of my long-time friends in the Ubuntu community and finally meet some other folks face to face. We’ve had a number of new contributors join us since we stopped doing Ubuntu Developer Summits and today UbuCons are the only Ubuntu-specific events where we have an opportunity to meet up.

Laura Fautley, Elizabeth K. Joseph, Alan Pope, Michael Hall

Of course I was also there to give a pair of talks. I first spoke on Contributing to Ubuntu on Desktops (slides) which is a complete refresh of a talk I gave a couple of times back in 2014. The point of that talk was to pull people back from the hype-driven focus on phones and clouds for a bit and highlight some of the older projects that still need contributions. I also spoke on Building a career with Ubuntu and FOSS (slides) which was definitely the more popular talk. I’ve given a similar talk for a couple UbuCons in the past, but this one had the benefit of being given while I’m between jobs. This most recent job search as I sought out a new role working directly with open source again gave a new dimension to the talk, and also made for an amusing intro, “I don’t have a job at this very moment …but without a doubt I will soon!” And in fact, I do have something lined up now.

Thanks to Tiago Carrondo for taking this picture during my talk! (source)

The venue for the conference was a kind of artists space, which made it a bit quirky, but I think worked out well. We had a couple social gatherings there at the venue, and buffet lunches were included in our tickets, which meant we didn’t need to go far or wait on food elsewhere.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time for sight-seeing this trip because I had a lot going on stateside (like having just bought a house!) but I did get to enjoy the beautiful Christmas Market in Essen a few of nights while I was there.

For those of you not familiar with German Christmas Markets (I wasn’t), they close roads downtown and pop up streets of wooden shacks that sell everything from Christmas ornaments and cookies to hot drinks, beers and various hot foods. We went the first night I was in town we met up with several fellow conference-goers and got some fries with mayonnaise, grilled mushrooms with Bearnaise sauce, my first taste of German Glühwein (mulled wine) and hot chocolate. The next night we went was a quick walk through the market that landed us at a steakhouse where we had a late dinner and a couple beers.

The final night we didn’t stay out late, but did get some much anticipated Spanish churros, which inexplicably had sugar rather than the cinnamon I’m used to, as well as a couple more servings of Glühwein, this time in commemorative Christmas mugs shaped like boots!

Clockwise from top left: José Antonio Rey, Philip Ballew, Michael Hall, John and Laura Fautley, Elizabeth K. Joseph

The next morning I was up bright and early to catch a 6:45AM train that started me on my three train journey back to Amsterdam to fly back to Philadelphia.

It was a great little conference and a lot of fun. Huge thanks to Sujeevan for being so incredibly welcoming to all of us, and thanks to all the volunteers who worked for months to make the event happen. Also thanks to Ubuntu community members who donate to the community fund since I would have otherwise had to self-fund to attend.

More photos from the event (and the Christmas Market!) here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157676958738915

He’s now created one for the upcoming Yakkety Yak release! So if you’re sick of all the yak shaving you’re doing as we prepare for this release, you may consider giving yak coloring a try.

But that’s not the only yak! We have Tom Macfarlane in the Canonical Design Team once again for sending me the SVG to update the Animal SVGs section of the Official Artwork page on the Ubuntu wiki. They’re sticking with a kind of origami theme this time for our official yak.

Download the SVG version for printing from the wiki page or directly here.

The evening was hosted by OpenDNS, who were incredibly welcoming and gracious hosts. Thanks so much, Jennifer Basalone and crew!

The space was excellent, having power strips set up at a pair of tables near the entrance, a whole area of seating for the presentation and an open floor plan that lent itself to casual chats as well as pulling out laptops to swap tips with each other. An Ubuntu Studio install was even started during the event. We did have the unfortunate snafu of a baseball game just down the street messing up nearby traffic a bit, but hopefully that didn’t discourage too many attendees, as public transit to the venue was still pretty easy.

The venue provided drinks and I was able to order salad and a pile of pizzas to make sure everyone was well fed throughout the event.

Like with my past presentations at LUGs in June and July, I brought along my underpowered Lenovo G575, which I had Ubuntu 16.04 running on and my Dell Mini 9 with Xubuntu 16.04. Plus I had my pair of tablets, Nexus 7 and Aquaris M10 with the hot-off-the-download OTA-12.

The tablets definitely got the most attention at this event, and showing off desktop mode (convergence!) by connecting my Lenovo keyboard+mouse combo to the Aquaris M10 was a lot of fun.

I did my release presentation a final time at this event, this time updated with OTA-12 notes. Slides available: sf_release_party_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), sf_release_party_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M), please feel free to use them as you see fit.

A few more photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157671609240786

Making my way closer to home, I continued my tour of Ubuntu 16.04 talks in the San Francisco Bay Area. A couple weeks ago I gave the talk at SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux Users Group) and on Tuesday I spoke at BALUG (Bay Area Linux Users Group).

I hadn’t been down to an SVLUG meeting in a couple years, so I appreciated the invitation. They have a great space set up for presentations, and the crowd was very friendly. I particularly enjoyed that folks came with a lot of questions, which meant we had an engaging evening and it stretched what is alone a pretty short talk into one that filled the whole presentation time. Slides: svlug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), svlug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)

Presentation, tablets and giveaways at SVLUG

At BALUG this week things were considerably more casual. The venue is a projector-less Chinese restaurant these days and the meetings tend to be on the small side. After family style dinner, attendees gathered around my big laptop running Ubuntu as I walked through my slide deck. It worked better than expected, and the format definitely lent itself to people asking questions and having discussions throughout too. Very similar slides to the ones I had at SVLUG: balug_ubuntu_1604.pdf (6.0M), balug_ubuntu_1604.odp (5.4M)

Setup and giveaways at BALUG

Next week my Ubuntu 16.04 talk adventures culminate in the event I’m most excited about, the San Francisco Ubuntu 16.04 release party at OpenDNS office located at 135 Bluxome St in San Francisco!

The event is on Thursday, July 28th from 6:30 – 8:30PM.

It’s right near the Caltrain station, so where ever you are in the bay it should be easy to get to.

• Laptops running Ubuntu and Xubuntu 16.04.
• Tablets running the latest Ubuntu build, including the bq Aquaris M10 that shipped with Ubuntu and demonstrates convergence.
• Giveaways, including the 9th edition of the Official Ubuntu book (new release!), pens, stickers and more.

I’ll need to plan for food, so I need folks to RSVP. There are a few options for RSVP:

• LoCo Team Portal
• Meetup.com
• email me at lyz at ubuntu.com

Need more convincing? It’ll be fun! And I’m a volunteer whose systems engineering job is unrelated to the Ubuntu project. In order to continue putting the work into hosting these events, I need the satisfaction of having people come.

Finally, event packs from Canonical are now being shipped out to LoCos! It’s noteworthy that for this release instead of shipping DVDs, which have been in sharp popularity decline over the past couple of years, they are now shipping USB sticks. These are really nice, but the distribution is limited to just 25 USB sticks in the shipment for the team. This is an order of magnitude fewer than we got with DVDs, but they’re also much more expensive.

Event pack from Canonical

Not in the San Francisco Bay Area? If you feel inspired to give an Ubuntu 16.04 presentation, you’re welcome to use my slides, and I’d love to see pictures from your event!

With the LTS release coming up, I reached out to him again.

He quickly turned my request around, and now we have a xerus to color!

Click the image or here to download the full size version for printing.

Huge thanks to Ronnie for coming through with this, it’s shared with a CC-SA license, so I encourage people to print and share them at their release events and beyond!

While we’re on the topic of the our African ground squirrel friend, thanks to Tom Macfarlane of the Canonical Design Team I was able to update the Animal SVGs section of the Official Artwork page on the Ubuntu wiki. For those of you who haven’t seen the mascot image, it’s a real treat.

It’s a great accompaniment to your release party. Download the SVG version for printing from the wiki page or directly here.

It was at this meet-and-greet where I first got to see several folks I hadn’t seen since the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) back in Copenhagen in 2012. Others I had seen recently at other open source conferences and still more I was meeting for the first time, amazing contributors to our community who I’d only had the opportunity to get to know online. It was at that event that the excitement and energy I used to get from UDS came rushing back to me. I knew this was going to be a great event.

The official start of this first UbuCon Summit began Thursday morning. I arrived bright and early to say hello to everyone, and finally got to meet Scarlett Clark of the Kubuntu development team. If you aren’t familiar with her blog and are interested in the latest updates to Kubuntu, I highly recommend it. She’s also one of the newly elected members of the Ubuntu Community Council.

Me and Scarlett Clark

After morning introductions, we filed into the ballroom where the keynote and plenaries would take place. It was the biggest ballroom of the conference venue! The SCALE crew really came through with support of this event, it was quite impressive. Plus, the room was quite full for the opening and Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, particularly when you consider that it was a Thursday morning. Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines, familiar names to anyone who has been to previous UbuCon events at SCALE, opened the conference with a welcome and details about how the event had grown this year. Logistics and other details were handled now too, and then they quickly went through how the event would work, with a keynote, series of plenaries and then split User and Developer tracks in the afternoon. They concluded by thanking sponsors and various volunteers and Canonical staff who made the UbuCon Summit a reality.

UbuCon Summit introduction by Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines

The welcome, Mark’s keynote and the morning plenaries are available on YouTube, starting here and continuing here.

Mark’s keynote began by acknowledging the technical and preference diversity in our community, from desktop environments to devices. He then reflected upon his own history in Linux and open source, starting in university when he first installed Linux from a pile of floppies. It’s been an interesting progression to see where things were twenty years ago, and how many of the major tech headlines today are driven by Linux and Ubuntu, from advancements in cloud technology to self-driving cars. He continued by talking about success on a variety of platforms, from the tiny Raspberry Pi 2 to supercomputers and the cloud, Ubuntu has really made it.

With this success story, he leapt into the theme of the rest of his talk: “Great, let’s change.” He dove into the idea that today’s complex, multi-system infrastructure software is “too big for apt-get” as you consider relationships and dependencies between services. Juju is what he called “apt-get for the cloud/cluster” and explained how LXD, the next evolution of LXC running as a daemon, gives developers the ability to run a series of containers to test deployments of some of these complex systems. This means that just like the developers and systems engineers of the 90s and 00s were able to use open source software to deploy demonstrations of standalone software on our laptops, containers allow the students of today to deploy complex systems locally.

He then talked about Snappy, the new software packaging tooling. His premise was that even a six month release cycle is too long as many people are continuously delivering software from sources like GitHub. Many places have a solid foundation of packages we rely upon and then a handful of newer tools that can be packaged quickly in Snappy rather than going through the traditional Debian Packaging route, which is considerably more complicated. It was interesting to listen to this, as a former Debian package maintainer myself I always wanted to believe that we could teach everyone to do software packaging. However, seeing these efforts play out the community work with app developers it became clear between their reluctance and the backlog felt by the App Review Board, it really wasn’t working. Snappy moves us away from PyPI, PPAs and such into an easier, but still packaged and managed, way to handle software on our systems. It’ll be fascinating to see how this goes.

Mark Shuttleworth on Snappy

He concluded by talking about the popular Internet of Things (IoT) and how Ubuntu Core with Snappy is so important here. DJI, “the market leader in easy-to-fly drones and aerial photography systems,” now offers an Ubuntu-driven drone. The Open Source Robotics Institute uses Ubuntu. GE is designing smart kitchen appliances powered by Ubuntu and many (all?) of the self-driving cars known about use Ubuntu somewhere inside them. There was also a business model here, a company that produces the hardware and a minimal features set that comes with it, also sells a more advanced version, and then industry-expert third parties who further build upon it to sell industry-specific software.

After Mark’s talk there were a series of plenaries that took place in the same room.

First up was Sergio Schvezov who followed on Mark’s keynote nicely as he gave a demo of Snapcraft, the tool used to turn software into a .snap package for Ubuntu Core. Next up was Jorge Castro who gave a great talk about the state of Gaming on Ubuntu, which he said was “Not bad.” Having just had this discussion with my sister, the timing was great for me. On the day of his talk, there were 1,516 games on Steam that would natively run on Linux, a nice selection of which are modern games that are new and exciting across multiple platforms today. He acknowledged the pre-made Steam Boxes but also made the case for homebrewed Steam systems with graphics card recommendations, explaining that Intel did fine, AMD is still lagging behind high performance with their open source drivers and giving several models of NVidia cards today that do very well (from low to high quality, and cost: 750Ti, 950, 960, 970, 980, 980Ti). He also passed around a controller that works with Linux to the audience. He concluded by talking about some issues remaining with Linux Gaming, including regressions in drivers that cause degraded performance, the general performance gap when compared to some other gaming systems and the remaining stigma that there are “no games” on Linux, which talks like this are seeking to reverse. Plenaries continued with Didier Roche introducing Ubuntu Make, a project which makes creating a developer platform out of Ubuntu with several SDKs much easier so that developers reduce the bootstrapping time. His blog has a lot of great posts on the tooling. The last talk of the morning was by Scarlett Clark, who gave us a quick update on Kubuntu Development, explaining that the team had recently joined forces with KDE packagers in Debian to more effectively share resources in their work.

It was then time for group photo! Which included my xerus, and where I had a nice chat (and selfie!) with Carla Sella as we settled in for the picture.

Me and Carla Sella

In the afternoon I attended the User track, starting off with Nathan Haines on The Future of Ubuntu. In this talk he talked about what convergence of devices meant for Ubuntu and warded off concerns that the work on the phone was done in isolation and wouldn’t help the traditional (desktop, server) Ubuntu products. With Ubuntu Core and Snappy, he explained, all the work done on phones is being rolled back into progress made on the other systems, and even IoT devices, that will use them in the future. Following Nathan was the Ubuntu Redux talk by Jono Bacon. His talk could largely be divided into two parts: History of Ubuntu and how we got here, and 5 recommendations for the Ubuntu community. He had lots of great stories and photos, including one of a very young Mark, and moved right along to today with Unity 8 and the convergence story. His 5 recommendations were interesting, so I’ll repeat them here:

1. Focus on core opportunities. Ubuntu can run anywhere, but should it? We have finite resources, focus efforts accordingly.
2. Rethink what community in Ubuntu is. We didn’t always have Juju charmers and app developers, but they are now a major part of our community. Understand that our community has changed and adjust our vision as to where we can find new contributors.
3. Get together more in person. The Ubuntu Online Summit works for technical work, but we’ve missed out on the human component. In person interactions are not just a “nice to have” in communities, they’re essential.
4. Reduce ambiguity. In a trend that would continue in our leadership panel the next day, some folks (including Jono) argue that there is still ambiguity around Intellectual Propoerty and licensing in the Ubuntu community (Mark disagrees).
5. Understand people who are not us.

Nathan Haines on The Future of Ubuntu

The next presentation was my own, on Building a career with Ubuntu and FOSS where I drew upon examples in my own career and that of others I’ve worked with in the Ubuntu community to share recommendations for folks looking to contribute to Ubuntu and FOSS as a tool to develop skills and tools for their career. Slides here (PDF). David Planella on The Ubuntu phone and the road to convergence followed my talk. He walked audience members through the launch plan for the phone, going through the device launch with BQ for Ubuntu enthusiasts, the second phase for “innovators and early adopters” where they released the Meizu devices in Europe and China and went on to explain how they’re tackling phase three: general customer availability. He talked about the Ubuntu Phone Insiders group of 30 early access individuals who came from a diverse crowd to provide early feedback and share details (via blog posts, social media) to others. He then gave a tour of the phones themselves, including how scopes (“like mini search engines on your phone”) change how people interact with their device. He concluded with a note about the availability of the SDK for phones available at developer.ubuntu.com, and that they’re working to make it easy for developers to upload and distribute their applications.

Video from the User track can be found here. The Developer track was also happening, video for that can be found here. If you’re scanning through these to find a specific talk, note that each is 1 hour long.

Presentations for the first day concluded with a Q&A with Richard Gaskin and Nathan Haines back in the main ballroom. Then it was off to the Thursday evening drinks and appetizers at Porto Alegre Churrascaria! Once again, a great opportunity to catch up with friends old and new in the community. It was great running into Amber Graner and getting to talk about our respective paid roles these days, and even touched upon key things we worked on in the Ubuntu community that helped us get there.

The UbuCon Summit activities continued after a SCALE keynote with an Ubuntu Leadership panel which I participated in along with Oliver Ries, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Michael Hall, Nathan Haines and José Antonio Rey with Jono Bacon as a moderator. Jono had prepared a great set of questions, exploring the strengths and weaknesses in our community, things we’re excited about and eager to work on and more. We also took questions from the audience. Video for this panel and the plenaries that followed, which I had to miss in order to give a talk elsewhere, are available here. The link takes you to 1hr 50min in, where the Leadership panel begins.

The afternoon took us off into unconference mode, which allowed us to direct our own conference setup. Due to aforementioned talk I was giving elsewhere, I wasn’t able to participate in scheduling, but I did attend a couple sessions in the afternoon. First was proposed by Brendan Perrine where we talked about strategies for keeping the Ubuntu documentation up to date, and also talked about the status of the Community Help wiki, which has been locked down due to spam for nearly a month(!). I then joined cm-t arudy to chat about an idea the French team is floating around to have people quickly share stories and photos about Ubuntu in some kind of community forum. The conversation was a bit tool-heavy, but everyone was also conscious of how it would need to be moderated. I hope I see something come of this, it sounds like a great project.

With the UbuCon Summit coming to a close, the booth was the next great task for the team. I couldn’t make time to participate this year, but the booth featured lots of great goodies and a fleet of contributors working the booth who were doing a fantastic job of talking to people as the crowds continued to flow through each day.

Huge thanks to everyone who spent months preparing for the UbuCon Summit and booth on the SCALE14x expo hall. It was a really amazing event that I was proud to be a part of. I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Finally, I took responsibility for the @ubuntu_us_ca Twitter account throughout the weekend. It was the first time I’ve done such a comprehensive live-tweeting of an event from a team/project account. I recommend a browse through the tweets if you’re interested in hearing more from other great people live-tweeting the event. It was a lot of fun, but also surprisingly exhausting!

More photos from my time at SCALE14x (including lots of Ubuntu ones!) here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157663821501532