Collogue

Last week I spent some time reading through the wiki, the development team pages in particular. I was curious to see what it was like from the outside, since I’ve not been involved with the project for more than one year.

I have to admit the experience was bad:

* We are missing a technical roadmap. We have a schedule for the next release but it’s not clear what are the goals or even what people are working on.
* We don’t have clear instructions on how to setup a development or testing environment.
* We have no official documentation about activity development. A proper python SDK would go a long way to facilitate activity contributions, in my opinion.
* Some of our processes are a intimidating. I’m thinking about patch submission and new features in particular. It might be more a problem with the wording then with the actual processes.

A couple of more general observations:

* Most of the content looks outdated or the templates are just empty, which gives the wrong impression about the liveliness of the project.
* Reading mailing lists and following irc very regularly seems to be essential to contribute. Unfortunately that requires too much time for most people. I understand it a lot better now that I have an unrelated full time job.
* We have too many teams compared to the active contributors. Maybe merging or dropping some of them would help consolidating resources? For example I’m not convinced core and activity teams should be separated.

I could go on, but these are probably the most important points I wanted to raise. I would like to help addressing these issues, I don’t have a lot of time to spend on it but perhaps that actually gives me a good perspective!

Woa, I had promised an update more than one year ago… fail. Well, summarising one year of my life in a blog post is not going to work, so I will stick to the very basics and give another try to post regularly instead!

I’m now living in London and working for litl. I’m enjoying both the city and the new job a lot. I haven’t been hacking on Sugar for a long time, but I still intend to help out again one of these days! I’m just really bad at focusing on multiple things and the new job has been absorbing all of my attention so far.

Quick highlights about the last year:

- I’ve been having more of a social life then usual!
- Getting bored in London seems to be pretty much impossible. People and places are so varied, it’s like ten different cities in one. And culture is very accessible and alive.
- I’m reading a lot of books again which is something I had missed since I got a software job. As a side effect I feel english is becoming more and more my primary language, the one I think with.
- I want to go back to university, at least part time. Well, that’s something I wanted for a while, but now I started making concrete plans about it.

I’m on a two weeks vacation, for once without a laptop. I felt the need to just rest for a while and it’s working out very well, my energy is definitely refuelling. I will be in Italy with my family until Saturday and then spend one week in Spain. Looking forward to see the world cup final in Barcelona on Sunday! Go Spain!

I’m still alive! I’ll try to post an update on what I’m up to these days soon. I have not been able to read my personal email at all in the last couple of months. There was no hope to ever catch up with the backlog, so I just archived all of it. If you sent me mail and still need an answer from me please send it again. Sorry for the inconvenience, I’ll keep up with it again from now on (after having dropped some of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to, most likely).

I like quick, unplanned travels. Last saturday, when Daniela came back from work, we decided to go in an nice mountain valley near Turin, we was there a couple of years ago to see the winter olympic games. While we was travelling we realized that Juventus was playing in Turin the day after, so we stopped in Bergamo to take tickets for the match. Finding a place to eat in Turin proved to be quite frustrating, being S. Valentino night. We finally found a free place around 11 pm. The hotel on the other hand was cheap and pretty cool.

The day after we wake up early and headed to Sestriere. We spent the morning there, looking around, walking and taking pictures. We should go there again to ski one of these days. Then we came back to Turin. The stadium is very small so you are really near to the field, the match was pretty cool, expect for the final result, 1-1. Juventus had a lot of bad luck.

Sebastian, Frederick, Aleksey and Simon are making me smile. Well, more like jump around the room in awe! The latest SoaS snapshots has an impressive list of improvements and it sounds like there will more soon. Also I know they are making great progress on stream 2, the one based on Fedora 11. I have no words, go team!

I’ve been busy with job transition in the last few weeks and I had a good reason to experiment more with visibility cycles. They works impressively well. A couple of years ago someone told me:

“Oh, I remember. I also remember a man who just stepped up and tried new things, who just did it because it made sense to him and created the change that he wanted to see in the world through direct action. No whining, no bullshit, just executing and learning as you went. That’s you today, too. Your best quality. You probably don’t know this but it’s a rare quality.”

What I learned since then is that most of the time you can’t create changes in the world alone. And I learned it the hard way, by failing and burning myself out. Ideas are social artifacts, we come up with them in first place because they might be useful to someone. We can’t own them, we should set them free and let them grow in someone else hands.

In a community setting you need to come up with a solid prototype of your idea, share it in it’s incompleteness and then hide as fast as you can. You don’t disappear, you keep teaching what you learned and removing road blocks. But you let someone else lead, take the whole space and run.

Today I’m leaving Red Hat. As you can imagine that means I’m no more employed to work on OLPC/Sugar.

Something similar happened temporarily several months ago and I was so sad and scared for Sugar future. I’m happy to report that this time I’m totally happy, excited and confident about being back to be a volounteer. This is the result of the progress Sugar made as a community, we are now walking alone and we don’t need a company or a person to drive development.

I know, it’s a bit of a mess and there is way too much to do. But we did the huge step from a company driven project to a community one. That’s what really matters, only very few projects are able to make it. It will take two years or twenty, I don’t know, but now we are unstoppable and we will get where we want to be. The list of people that made this possible is way too long but… you know who you are and I want you to know that I’m grateful and proud about what each of you achieved.

So I’m a volounteer now and I will be able to throw all of my passion into the project again. I’ve been thinking and having conversations about the best way for me to contribute from now on. I’ll keep doing it and any feedback will be appreciated and valuable. In general, if you need help with anything just let me know!

After almost five years, today it’s my last day at Red Hat. It has been a wonderful ride. I never felt like I was simply doing my job, I was given the opportunity to work every single day on something I’m deeply passionate about. I will be always grateful to the company and to people for that. My only regret is to have spent too little time in Boston.

I accepted another job, but that’s the topic for another post, in a few days.

Yesterday we had an good “Sugar on a stick” meeting. We covered a lot of ground, even if in a somewhat disordered way. Disappointed to see regressions in my ability to host meetings. Looks like it’s something you need to keep exercising.

I’m pretty happy with the outcomings though, I think we managed to strike a good balance between Caroline focus on customers (thanks to keep pushing us in that direction) and developers desire to reuse as much as possible of Fedora work (i.e. good laziness). There was a lot of energy and everyone contributed to the discussion. On a somewhat related note I’m amazed by the great work Simon, Tomeu, Gary, Aleksey, Morgan and everyone else is doing these days. It’s a tough ride, no doubt. But we are making great strides, 0.84 will be a success. Thanks guys!

Before the meeting I went for a walk outdoor after… something like a couple of years. Just a very slow walk, probably half an hour, but I was really tired when I got back home. I guess that had to be expected.

The sun was shiny and the snow was beautiful. It was really cold but I didn’t feel it that much. Pictures are not great since they was taken with a cellphone, but better than nothing.

I just realized that today is probably my last free weekend before moving. I’m going to try and figure out something fun to do. It’s annoying that Daniela works on saturdays. One day and half is very short for interesting trips.

I have to travel tomorrow morning so I should be sleeping. But I’m nervous and I can’t say what I’m nervous about. So I’ll just write whatever passes through my mind, hoping it will clear my brain and let me sleep.

I’m behind with my email, apologies to everyone that is waiting an answer for me. I’ll try to catch up, hopefully after tomorrow. Probably going to miss marketing team meeting too, damn it.

Daiva booked her flight, she is coming on March 1. It will be wonderful after three years we don’t meet (or how many, I can’t even remember anymore!). She is arriving to Malpensa, we will come at the airport and maybe visit Milan while at it. Hopefully March will be warmer and less rainy than today.

Michela is awesome. I’m not sure how I would feel today without her help. I feel happy and stronger and excited about the future (well, this thing I can’t talk about). She might come visit us the next summer, in this place I cannot say yet. Looking forward for it already.

Had a pretty nice weekend. I brought a laptop with me but I had no network. And the laptop without an internet connection was unattractive, so I never turned it on. We cooked some delicious food, in particular a huge dish made of shrimps, totani (which I have no idea how to translate in english, some kind of fish anyway) and rosted potatoes. I want more of that right now! I had some time for reading finally, it helped me relaxing. Juventus match was a long sufference, we won when we had lost hope. Valkyrie was a bit of a delusion, maybe just not my kind of movie.

Sleep, Marco, sleep…