Czajkowski

Whooo we’ve made it and UDS-M has kicked off here in Brussels. There have been some slight issues for folks getting here due to inconvenient volcanic ash causing flight issues for some guys.

The day kicked off with a once again energetic Jono Bacon,  not sure where the guy gets his energy from but I’d love some! For those who’ve not been to a UDS before Jono is the Community Manager and kicks off the session with a recap of what has taken place in the last cycle, the idea for the week ahead and an introduction to the platform managers.  They gave a brief outline as to what they were going to be working on during the week.

There was an amazing video show put together by Robbie Williamson show casing the Ubuntu Community and the cycles of Ubuntu over the last few years. If I get the link I hope to post it here also as it was AWESOME!!!!

Following on from Jono, was Mark Shuttleworth who gave a short talk onUbuntu and it’s plan for the future.  Announcing  radical changes to the desktop, along with Ubuntu “Lite” being installed Dual Boot by Dell and other OEM’s that boots to a USABLE web browser in 7 seconds, this is available today by installing “Unity“.

“The Perfect 10″ as Mark describes it will consist of UNE, new icons, the new font and many other desktop improvements. And he is pushing for a Release on 10 Oct, 2010 or 10.10.10 , for those of you geeks out there ( like me ) binary 101010 = decimal 42 ( HHGTTG Reference )

Thanks to Alan Pope we have video and Q&A from the session.

Moving onto the sessions the day kicked off  for me  with a UDS Community Roundtable  discussion, planning out the week ahead and introductions was a nice way to start the week as some people have never met one another before and also just to put the face to the names which really helps at times. Following onto a session I was curious about was Development Workflow Review, which was an interesting discussion, how can we make it easier for developers to contribute and where they fit into the grand scheme of things.

Next session for me was Team Project Planning Workshop, wasn’t really sure what this one was on about, but it was interesting and a topic of blueprints came up. Why we use them and we showed off the burn down chart which when you look at it  and the the progress made by the community team it’s pretty amazing the stuff that was achieved in six months. With the discussion of using Roadmaps and blueprints under way we also noticed the documentation for using blueprints was slightly unhelpful and needed to be tweaked and refined with that in mind the Maverick Project Planning Improvements Blueprint  the first of the UDS-M was created. So with that in mind I thought I’d share with folks how I keep track of stuff I’ll be taking on at UDS.  I’ve mentioned before I’m a list whore. Lists, taks and to do items make sense to me in my noggin.

I’m a MASSIVE fan of tomboy, syncing them to Ubuntu one is so handy and I can reach them whenever I want.  I’ve created a tomboy note – Laura  UDS-M action items, it’s just a simple way of breaking down the actions items and the session for me.

[czajkowski] Identify what topics should be documented in a quick guide for managing a project: TODO
[czajkowski] Produce a first draft of the project planning quick guide: TODO
[czajkowski] Announce the document: TODO

I’ll just add the session, link to the gobby document and link to the blueprint and any action items I’ve received, just a handy way to see at a glance come Friday.

Final session today for me was Heuristic evaluation and bug tagging, really looking forward to following this topic for this cycle and seeing how it is implemented.  There seemed to be some concern coming from the bug triages guys who would be following this so I think they’ll see how the design team approach this for the cycle.

It’s been a great long day.  Great to catch up with people who I’ve worked with the for the last six months and also to meet new people.

Just one annoying irritating thing. I’ve been working all day on my mini 9 and the tomboy note was on that machine, I wanted to synchronise it to Ubuntu one and onto my other machine. YES I’ve logged a bug in fact I logged it months ago! It’s still bugging me and driving me somewhat batty crazy!!! It tells you to click on details and when you do, it’s BLANK! how unhelpful is that!

That’s my rant over! Have a great uds !