I had conversations with a couple of people today about the fact that I cannot stand working from remote any more. It turned out that the night would prove the point.
Spent the whole day at XOcamp, being tired I decided to head back home. Stopped at Legal to take some food. Gah! I left my power cord at the office! Grab my shrimps, run back, get in with some difficulties. Run into Mel, which also lost her power cord.
Well, a few hours later my stomach was complaining and my shrimps was cold, but I had spent a beautiful night with beautiful people. Mel trying to find the cheapest flight to Australia and later drawing us the plan for her travel around the world. Martin entertaining us with awesome New Zealand pictures and stories, while helping her out with the tickets. Adam noticing our excitement and pointing out that Martin has already found a new job… at the Wellington tourism office. Yifan looking very skeptical at the travel map, “But Mel, normal people usually spend six months to do *one* of the travels you drawed there”. “Sure, but they don’t sleep just three hours per night like me!”. Bernie and Michael friendly fighting about OLPC and Sugar Labs closeness, while migrating the build system.
Too tired and happy to say anything meaningful, I headed back home.
Finally back from vacation. It has been really wonderful travel, I got some rest and I re-energized, but now it’s time to get back to work. First up is email backlog. Already handled a good amount of it, longest and most difficult answers are left though. Tonight and tomorrow is going to be really busy.
And then I need to prepare for FUDCon and XOCamp. I would like to give one talk for each, but I haven’t prepared any slides yet, I will see if I can sprint them tomorrow. Leaving on Thursday and looking forward to meet everyone there and to make as much progress as we did at Sugarcamp.
Spending the whole day to write email made me realize once again how frustrating is for me to write in english. I’m always unsatisfied about the way I say things, because I miss the words to say exactly what I want to say. I usually have to reread and tweak an email several times before I’m ready to hit the send button. My mind is sort of screwed up between two languages. I can talk and think about computer stuff only in english (at the point that I force Bernie to talk in english even if it’s just the two of us), but I’m unsatisfied about my writings quality. And I can talk decently about personal stuff only in italian, which is frustrating when posting a blog. I need to find the time to read a bunch of books in english, I think that will help a lot.
Back to work, lots of email to answer!
I have been travelling during the last week, with sporadic internet access and anyway with very little time to read and answer email. Even less to write code, duh! I will be back home only on 5 January, but I’ll try to deal with my email queue earlier, hopefully in the next couple of nights. Apologizes to everyone for the delays!
In the last two weeks I spent quite a bit of time trying to get to the point where the community can start dogfooding collaboration. Our scalability and reliability problems are well known and, as agreed by everyone at Sugarcamp, we need to get at least the most common scenarios working well for Sugar 0.84. Robert and Guillaume has kindly setup a server, with support for gadget at jabber.sugarlabs.org, which we are using now by default in sugar-jhbuild and SoaS.
The results of the testing are very encouraging so far. I haven’t really tested scalability yet but, with a few buddies, presence seems to be completely reliable. This morning I decided to push it a litle further, I opened up a bunch of sugar-jhbuild emulators, created a few activities and joined them. The result is looking very nice!
Pretty productive day! Simon bugsquad meeting has been really fun, we discussed all the road blockers and got all of them quickly out of the way. Next week it will be fun to move to the actual triaging. Enough words, let’s get it done!
After that we had a discussion about testing coordination between upstream and downstream, I’m a flaky meeting host and I have not yet posted notes, I will do tomorrow. But we made lots of progress, especially on activity testing. Both meetings lasted exactly one hour, as planned. Mel is an awesome teacher.
I’m finding it increasingly hard to go to sleep at night. I’m way too excited about the progress Sugar, as a community, is making these days. Yeah it’s hard. Collaboration is not yet working and activities packaging is going so slowly… It’s not just hard, it’s impossible perhaps. But we are all so crazy that we might actually do it.
Enough blogging. SLEEP!
Update: As promised I posted testing meeting notes.
At the usual place… buildbot.sugarlabs.org. Please keep an eye on it when checking in changes or adding dependencies. Next step is to give it some automated testing love.
I’m gradually moving over my git modules to git.sugarlabs.org. I have to say that I really love gitorious. Thanks to Bernando and OSL for setting it up. The interface is very simple and the workflow is awesome. No admin to beg to create your modules, you register and with a few clicks you can create as many git modules as you like. Also it’s really trivial to create forks and request merging. My only feature request is a way to have multiple owners for a module, co-maintenance is pretty common.
I hope this will also improve availability of development information about activities (how do I contact the author, where is the source code etc), because providing these informations is nicely integrated with the git modules setup. David and Tomeu are working on setting up activities.sugarlabs.org which is based on the same code of addons.mozilla.org and will provide user oriented informations. Infrastructure is shaping up nicely, yay!
Simon announced the first Bugsquad meeting. Help with bug triaging is a very low barrier entry to Sugar development, it’s also a great way to take some of the work off the shoulders of our small and overworked development team. No skills or knowdlege required, if you have a little of time you can devote to Sugar and you are willing to learn, you should totally join us tomorrow!