Back Home After UDS-M
It's Friday of UDS-M. I'm writing this from home, waiting on my electricity to be restored. I'm anxious to get to work today, to put in place plans to act on some of the ideas for Launchpad Bugs that came out of UDS-M.
With timezone differences between Alabama and Brussels, the day is half done at UDS, while the sun isn't yet up here. I came home Wednesday, but due to 5 hours of delay at the Brussels airport and 2 hours of delay getting through customs in Atlanta, I didn't get home until early AM yesterday, finishing at a better than twenty-two hour travel day. I was exhausted, and spent most of Thursday in bed. I can begin to imagine how my New Zealand and Australian friends feel every time they travel, and I wonder how they can even function afterwards.
I really only spent two full days at UDS. Monday was mostly about Launchpad Bugs for me. I went into a couple QA-related sessions. Jorge put together a couple sessions around patches and bugs that I attended. There was also the developer workflow sessions on both Monday and Tuesday. Certain themes came up frequently -- converting patches to branches and dealing with loads of bugs were mentioned often. Tuesday I had some time for a couple sessions of interest to me personally, mostly to do with the desktop track and application development on Ubuntu. Quickly and Ground Control are amazing, and you should be using these if you're not already.
I even found small bits of time for hacking next to friends on the Landscape and Bazaar teams who were sprinting at UDS. I contributed a tiny patch to Ground Control, and between these two days at UDS and hacking nights at the SomeHands meeting we had for work the week before, finished off 3 Launchpad branches and got some serious work done on lazr-js/Launchpad branches exploring ways to clean up all the icons on the bug page. I also did a bit of mockup hacking, to get the ideas from these branches in a form easy to show and talk about. We've made some progress in the last six months making the bugs home page for a project really nice, and I hope we can do something similar for the bug page over the next six months.
Our plans currently include making subscriptions and notifications better for Launchpad bugs. The rest of our 6 month cycle is yet to be planned, though we have certain themes we know we will be exploring. Everyone at UDS had ideas about what we could be doing to make Launchpad better. We're all software engineers, so opinions are easy to come by. Now we have to find a way to schedule the fixes that make sense, while also thinking of clever ways to address the larger problems, and all of this has to be done in the themes we've set for the coming development cycle for Launchpad.
There's lots to do, definitely. Now if my power would just come back up, I could get started working on some of this.
Posted by deryck on May 14, 2010
