In this update we reached out to Ubuntu Developer and juju Extraordinaire Clint Byrum for an interview and to see what he is working on in the 12.10 Release Cycle.
Benjamin Kerensa: What are you doing this cycle when it comes to Development surrounding juju?
Clint Byrum: With juju’s rewrite in Go, we’ve slowed down the actual development of
juju features, and are focused on documentation, quality, testing, and
building out the charm store. We’re also hopeful that Go will achieve
feature parity with the current Python based juju by the end of the cycle.
I’m also working on getting juju into Debian and there is an effort to
get juju packaged in Fedora as well.
Benjamin Kerensa: How do you feel about the roadmap of juju and is there any interesting stuff coming up on the horizon?
Clint Byrum: The Go port is keeping the feature list to a minimum. The most exciting
thing is the rewrite in Go itself, as it should clean up a few areas of
the code that were pretty difficult to understand. With more straight
forward code, in theory we should see features and bug fixes landing
faster.
Benjamin Kerensa: Are you working on any pet projects you would like to share about?
Clint Byrum: I’ve been really impressed with the interesting things contributed to
the “juju-jitsu” project. Thats a place where experimental features
and add-ons for juju are developed. If you’ve seen the “gource” demo
where a tree of machines/services is built in OpenGL glory, that lives
there. We also have clever tools in there to help integrate juju with
things like Capistrano.
Benjamin Kerensa: What tips do you have for those who are interested in contributing to juju?
Clint Byrum: If you have ever thought that your web apps are too heavy weight, and
should be spread out over more, smaller servers, then take a look at
how juju charms work. I used to struggle with this as a sysadmin and
web developer, and it shocked me how easy juju+ec2 made this.
Thanks again to Clint Byrum for taking the time for this interview and for more information on juju please go here.
Get Involved
- Read the Introduction to Ubuntu Development. It’s a short article which will help you understand how Ubuntu is put together, how the infrastructure is used and how we interact with other projects.
- Follow the instructions in the Getting Set Up article. A few simple commands, a registration at Launchpad and you should have all the tools you need, and you’re ready to go.
- Check out our instructions for how to fix a bug in Ubuntu, they come with small examples that make it easier to visualise what exactly you need to do.
Find something to work on
Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.
In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.
Getting in touch
There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.
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