Summary of Ubuntu Developer Week

Ubuntu Developer Week unfortunately is over, but it was a great success. Thanks a lot to all the speakers and all the helpers. Without your gracious help this wouldn’t have been possible at all. The great thing about these tuition weeks is that even if you couldn’t attend them, there’s logs later on, so here’s the executive summary for you, read the logs, get up to speed on what’s cooking and get involved!

Monday

1. Getting Started with Ubuntu Development: I was lucky enough to take the first two sessions and do a quick introduction to Ubuntu development and help everyone to get set up. I was amazed by all the great questions and the fun that people seemed to be having. It was just fantastic.
2. Introduction to Ubuntu Distributed Development (UDD): Next up was the rocking and unstoppable Barry Warsaw who did a action-packed session that explained how we use Bazaar and Launchpad for Ubuntu Development. By the end of the session you could see loads of new development branches coming in. Awesome!
3. Taking bite out of Unity: Jason Smith and Jorge Castro seem to have had a great time talking about Unity and how to get started fixing bugs and getting involved. The session is fun to read, so make sure you have a look if you didn’t have time yesterday.
4. Getting your fixes into Ubuntu, how to make sponsors happy: The exceptional Stefano Rivera took the last slot of the day and talked about how to actually get your fix into Ubuntu. An additional focus of the session was how to avoid common mistakes. There were heaps of questions and loads of great answers, so I expect more and more good fixes coming in soon. 😀

Tuesday

1. How to write a compiz plugin: Sam Spilsbury gave an excellent session about compiz and its plugin structure. Everything you need to get going to write your own plugin was explained nicely. If you want to bring more bling to Ubuntu, go ahead and check out the log, it also contains links to additional docs.
2. How Stable Release Updates work: Next up was the unstoppable Jean-Baptiste Lallement, who gave a great overview over how the Stable Release Updates (SRU) process works, how to avoid problems and how to fix bugs for millions of users out there.
3. The Ubuntu One App Developer Programme: Stuart Langridge brought us up to speed on what’s happening in the Ubuntu One world and how easily you can hook up your app with the cloud. It was a really exciting session with loads of ideas kicking around, putting pepperoni on top of a pizza definitely being the most boring one. 🙂
4. Rocking with Zeitgeist: Manish Sinha and Seif Lotfy gave a great session about using Zeitgeist and how to bring more fun to the world of apps and giving a user a better way of finding out what’s going on. Awesome.
5. Getting your fixes into Debian, how to make community happy: Gerfried Fuchs was up last and alone in this session, as Nigel unfortunately couldn’t make it. Still the session was totally worth reading as it was full of information about how Ubuntu and Debian collaborate and how they are slightly different.

Wednesday

1. TestDrive: First of the day was Andres Rodriguez who talked about TestDrive and how to make use of it for testing and toying around with various Ubuntu (and other Linuxes’) releases. Andres also tried to settle the question where Pisco was originally invented.
2. LoCo Directory Hacking: An awesome session delivered by Michael Hall about loco.ubuntu.com and how it is developed. If you are into web development, would like to see more LoCos use the service, check out the logs and get involved.
3. Ubuntu ARM and the OMAP4 images: Next up was Oliver Grawert who gave a great introduction into what’s happening in ARM land right now and how Ubuntu developers are putting great work into porting everything necessary. His classy answer to the question of “arm?” was “yes :)”.
4. Developing IRC bots: Terence Simpson gave a session about IRC bots, how they are used, how to implement a bot, etc. A really insightful and interesting session. Also he actively contradicted me: it seems he didn’t start hacking on IRC bots when he was 5, probably closer to 6. 🙂
5. Rocking out with libunity: Mikkel Kampstrup had the last session of the day and gave a well-structured and nicely prepared session, explaining how to interact with Unity, add places and integrate with the launcher. Super interesting stuff. I hope people make great use of it soon.

Thursday

1. Integrating your package with Launchpad Translations: David Planella kicked off the day and gave a sterling session on getting most out of Launchpad’s Translations goodness in a pain-free and fun way.
2. Getting Started with Unity 2D: We started with 5 minutes delay, but the session was entirely worth the waiting time. Florian Boucault gave a great session explaining the foundations of Unity 2D, the plans and how to get involved.
3. Q+A with Ubuntu Engineering Director: A super interesting session with everyone’s favourite Rick Spencer. Rick got quite a bunch of good questions, so check out the log and find out what Rick does and how things work out in Ubuntu development.
4. Getting your app into Ubuntu (Post-release): Stéphane Graber is a member of the Application Review Board (ARB) and so he was in the perfect position to explain how the process works, what the requirements are and how to bring fun apps to Ubuntu.
5. Good stuff in ubuntu-dev-tools: Benjamin Drung did an awesome job explaining our favourite toolset and the gems hidden in it. Check out the log, make good use of them and maybe you want to add your own tools to it? 🙂

Friday

1. Getting better bug reports: The day kicked off with Brian Murray and Nigel Babu, who explained how to use and extend Apport for packages that you are interested in. Seriously good stuff that prevents a lot of bug conversation ping-pong.
2. Introducing boto EC2 Cloud API: Ahmed Kamal did a terrific job of explaining the boto EC2 Cloud API. It’s simple, easy to use and super useful whatever you might want to get done.
3. Introduction to Django Development: Łukasz Czyżykowski was up next and gave an excellent session explaining how to get started using Django for developing websites. He zipped through an interesting and small example that showcases how beautiful and powerful Django is.
4. Getting started with daily builds in Launchpad: I’m glad we had Michał Zając (and Philip Muškovac) giving a session about Daily Builds in Launchpad. A super-helpful service that will give you latest upstream goodness to play with in a very pain-free way.
5. Project Lightning Talks: This was an experiment, but I’m quite sure that it’s here to stay. It was quite exciting to learn about loads of new projects that are going on. So if we can give all of them a platform for introducing themselves and attracting new users and contributors, we should definitely do that. Check out the log – seriously good stuff!