Announcing Ubuntu Developer Week

Welcome to the Ubuntu Developer Week! We will have one week of action-packed sessions from Jan 25^th 2010 to Jan 29^th 2010!

Ubuntu Developer Week is a series of online workshops where you can:

• learn about different packaging techniques
• find out more about different development teams
• check out the efforts of the world-wide Development Community
• participate in open Q&A sessions with Ubuntu developers
• much more…

All sessions will happen on IRC, and the best way to join is to use Lernid. (There are other ways too. :-))

If you’re not comfortable yet asking all your questions in English, we will have a couple of people helping to translate your questions and translating back the answers. Have a look at the Ubuntu Developer Week page to see how it works.

Like the sound of it? DIGG IT!

So let’s have a look at the schedule together, shall we? We have a number of sessions next week for all tastes and interests. Feel free to come to as few or as many sessions as you like. All of them are free and open to anyone.

Monday, 25th January 2010

• 16:00 UTC, Getting Started with UbuntuDevelopment — Daniel Holbach (dholbach): The first session of the week is going to get you started with Ubuntu development. It’ll give you an overview over how all things work, so at least you’ll have heard the most important vocabularly already and get your initial development environment set up.
• 17:00 UTC, Fixing small bugs in Ubuntu —Daniel Holbach (dholbach): So once we have our initial development environment set up, we’ll go ahead and fix a couple of small bugs… it’s going to be awesome and you’ll find out that it’s not really hard.
• 18:00 UTC, Django — Dave Walker (Daviey): Dave Walker, of Ubuntu UK fame will talk you through the first steps of using the Django framework to create a lean, understandable and scalable web application in python.
• 19.00 UTC, Working on the Bleeding Edge — Kees Cook (kees): Next up is Kees Cook, who will tell us how to best do both: 1) stay sane and 2) live on the bleeding edge. If you enjoy tracking development releases closely you should make sure not to miss this session. It’ll spare you a lot of pain.
• 20.00 UTC, Server oriented packages — Mathias Gug (mathiaz): Are you a server person? Would you like to get involved with the server team? Do you want to know what’s server-specific about packaging? Find out during the session: we have Mathias Gug here who’ll help you get started.

Tuesday, 26th January 2010

• 16:00 UTC, Java libraries packaging — Thierry Carrez (ttx): We have Thierry Carrez here who had the pleasure of working with Java Packaging extensively. Did you ever want to package a Java library or a Java application and struggled with your first steps? Don’t despair, we have an expert with us. Attend the session and learn Thierry’s tips and tricks.
• 17:00 UTC, Launchpad Translations under the hood — Adi Roiban (adiroiban) and Henning Eggers (henninge): Launchpad Translations is amazing. Millions of strings, thousand of translators, hundreds of languages and thousand of applications get together and make for an accessible and understandable great linux distribution. If you ever wondered how it works under the hood and how things get together, this is the perfect opportunity. Listen to what Henning and Adi have to say!
• 18:00 UTC, Internationalizing your application with quickly and Launchpad — David Planella (dpm) and Didier Roche (didrocks): quickly is a fantastic little application. It makes writing apps so much easier and comprehensible. There’s already a lot of apps written with quickly and already a bunch of instructions on how to use it. This session will specifically deal with how to get applications translatable and translated. Thanks a lot Didier and David.
• 19:00 UTC, Getting started with EC2 — Scott Moser (smoser): Next up is Scott Moser who will talk to us about how to use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Ubuntu is a great platform to use in the cloud and this session will give you an overview and cover the best tools to make your cloud experience most enjoyable.
• 20:00 UTC, Automated server testing — Søren Hansen (soren): Mr. Søren Hansen wrapped his head around Automated Server Testing in the last few months and he has a lot of ideas to share. If you’re intererested in automating tests in general and testing servers specifically, this is exactly where you should be going.

Wednesday 27th January 2010

• 16:00 UTC, Writing good test-cases — John Arbash Meinel (jam): We all agree that encountering bugs in most cases is just not necessary. Sometimes it’s just a small typo that caused the problem or a wrong assumption. Enter test-cases. A lot of big open source projects have moved to test-driven development already or ask developers to add a test-case for bugs they fixed. The notion of making sure that bugs don’t happen again or that assumptions don’t suddenly change during some phase of re-design has prevented a lot of bugs. We have John Arbash Meinel here who will tell us how to cause less bugs by writing good test-cases.
• 17:00 UTC, Adding Ubuntu One support to your applications — Stuart Langridge (aquarius): You want your application to save data in a clever way? You want to get it synced across various computers? You want it in a place where it’s properly backed up? You have heard of Ubuntu One? Great, because Stuart Langridge will explain how to get this all done very very easily.
• 18:00 UTC, Getting your application in the panel — Ted Gould (ted): The status area in the panel has gone through some pretty fantastic changes in the karmic and lucid cycle. Ted Gould has been massively involved in the planning, design and coding. If you want to do some good work on the Desktop and make your favourite application benefit from the new indicators make sure you attend this session.
• 19:00 UTC, Developing and Testing in KVM —Dustin Kirkland (kirkland): Dustin Kirkland has been working a lot with KVM, a fantastic virtualisation technology, in the last few months. Once you learned all of Dustin’s tricks you will never going to miss them for developing and testing every again.
• 20:00 UTC, Python Applications Packaging — Luca Falavigna (DktrKranz): Your favourite application is writting in Python? That’s quite understandable. It’s not packaged yet? Looks like a small challenge ahead. Luckily we have Luca Falavigna who can help you with the task. He’ll talk about common pitfalls, how to avoid them and how to make the task as easy as possible.

Thursday 28th January 2010

• 16:00 UTC, Adopt-an-Upstream — Jorge Castro (jcastro) and Daniel Holbach (dholbach): Jorge Castro and Daniel Holbach will talk about the relationship between the Ubuntu project and Upstream projects in general and how you can help out. It’s not as hard as it sounds and if you are really fond of and passionate about a certain Upstream project, this is the perfect session for you!
• 17:00 UTC, Kernel patches — Leann Ogasawara (ogasawara): Kernel work is complicated? It can be… but there’s help! Leann Ogasawara is going to explain the workflow of the Kernel team and how we deal with patches there. You can get help from the team and Leann’s session will help you understand how to avoid the most common mistakes. Awesome.
• 18:00 UTC, Getting more detailed bug reports — Brian Murray (bdmurray): Brian Murray has looked thounsands of bug reports in his life. He knows how important it is to have all the important information right there without going through a feedback loop for weeks. Luckily there’s tools that can automate the process of getting us the right information right at the start. Brian will teach you how.
• 19:00 UTC, Bazaar and packaging — Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer): Jelmer Vernooij knows a lot about Bazaar and a lot about Packaging and he’s a great guy which will make this session great to fun to be in. Using a revision control system makes packaging and maintaining packages a lot more fun, especially if you start merging your work with others.
• 20:00 UTC, How to get started hacking Launchpad — Karl Fogel (kfogel): Launchpad is open source and it’s written in Python, which make it a perfect opportunity to get involved with and your personal pet peeve fixed easily. Karl Fogel will talk you through the first steps of hacking Launchpad. Awesome!

Friday, 29th January 2010

• 16:00 UTC, Writing Beautiful Code — Paul Hummer (rockstar): Paul Hummer is with us and he’ll show you how to write python code like a rock star. There’s a lot of worth in writing understandable, easily scanable code and there’s just a few conventions you have to follow to make yourself happier and your fellow contributors as well.
• 17:00 UTC, Doing merges right — Colin Watson (cjwatson): Merging is one of the inevitable things in open source development. We collaborate, we work together in the open and sometimes we decide to focus our attention on different things, so merges might be a bit more tricky afterwards. Colin Watson has been doing hundreds (if not thousands) of merges in his life, so he’s the perfect person to share a few tips to make the experience more seamless.
• 18:00 UTC, Meet launchpadlib — Jonathan Lange (jml): Ever found yourself in a position where you neede some data from Launchpad? Ever needed to automate a task that involved something in Launchpad somehow? There’s one answer to all these problems: Use python-launchpadlib. We’ll have Jonathan Lange there who will tell you how to use it efficiently and where best to start.
• 19:00 UTC, KDE/Kubuntu Junior Jobs/Papercuts — Celest Lyn Paul (seele): You’re a friend of the big K? You have a small usability bug you always wanted to fix? Always wanted to get involved with hacking on KDE somehow? Awesome. Celeste Lyn Paul knows how to do it and she’ll deliver a great session where we’ll talk about exactly that! Awesome!
• 20:00 UTC, Interpreting Stacktraces — Emmet Hikory (persia): Ever found yourself faced with a crashing application and you were told to decipher some kind of stacktrace? It’s definitely one of the proficiencies that are incredibly helpful and will help you fix a lot of problems. Emmet Hikory will deliver a great session about getting the most information our of stacktraces with the least amount of hassle.

This weeks is going to be fantastic and if you ever thought of joining the ranks of Ubuntu developers, this is the best time ever.