A Plug for Moleskine

First off, I need to say something about my method for taking notes here. Prior to leaving for my trip, I picked up two Moleskine notebooks that have unlined pages in them. I'd seen them used by many of my colleagues and friends, but never really saw why they had such hype behind them. After looking through my notes, there was something about the Moleskine that absolutely changed the way I write notes. The diagrams, blurbs, and quotes I wrote down last week were in a completely different and amazing format that allowed me to actually capture a lot of the thoughts I usually just try to reference and hope I remember.

On Collaboration

Collaboration has been on my mind for a while, and there are a lot of thoughts I have that are arranging themselves into blog post as we speak. I'm amazed at how much Canonical and its employees are thinking about collaboration. There was an overwhelming amount of questions like "How can we make X better?" and "What if we did Y like this? Would it be easier?"

Launchpad and Bazaar are two humongous examples of us trying to make collaboration easier. Launchpad has created this workflow for handling your code, doing merges of other people's code, getting bugs fixed, getting your code translated, releasing tarballs, and allowing people to easily install software into Ubuntu based machines. Launchpad has a rich code review system, which I am convinced is the best way to make open source software better.

The Ayatana Project excites me beyond my ability to express. Free software is generally written, tested, and (unfortunately) designed by geeks. This usually means that to find a tool with great design and usability is a gem. To have a team that is completely and totally devoted to making free software easy to use for my mother is amazing. Take your app (you know, the one you think is just amazing), get someone's attention in #ayatana on Freenode, and ask them (ever so nicely) what you can do to make it stellar. Do it. Do it now.

UbuntuOne is going to end up being a great service, and I would venture to say it will be a reference guide to the web services of the future. No data lock-in, open protocols, standards-based implementations, and the sky is the limit. UbuntuOne isn't about file sharing (although that is a cute first feature). It's about sharing data in any form, and as it fills out, it really will make collaboration even more social.

Finally, I wrote an open ended question to myself to think about, and thought that maybe I'd throw it out here as well. For context, Jono Bacon was talking about community (y'know, plugging his book and all that :), and I wrote "Open source thrives on a meritocracy - how can we prevent feelings of entitlement?" I see this a lot in open source communities: people earn their "commit rights" and then start behaving like everyone owes them something. Collaboration is about peers, not about hierarchies.

Getting Organized

A highlight of the talks I attended was a talk by Jono Bacon on recognizing and avoiding burnout. It was on eye opener for me. I spend a lot of time writing code, and I have now recognized that at some level I'm getting burned out by it. I'm doing a lot of things at the same time, and doing them absolutely terribly.

The biggest thing that hit me was that my methods for staying organized are terrible, and they aren't working. When this happens, one may be working hard, but not accomplishing much of anything. I've since restructured what my daily planning is like, and will report when I have data on its success or failure.

The Culture of Canonical

This was my greatest experience at AllHands. The nature of Canonical is that most of us work from home. This means that we can easily miss out on the social aspects of co-located work, like going out for a beer (Coke for me thanks) after work, shooting Nerf guns at each other, etc. However, because we work with these people on a daily basis, we form these incredibly strong bonds, so much that when we actually meet on this physical plane, we're old friends that would bend over backwards for one another.

Daniel Holbach epitomizes the Canonical culture at the very core with his hugs. I think of my direct manager more as my friend than as my manager. I enjoy seeing the rest of my team in person, because they are all really great people. There is absolutely no difference in social status between Mark Shuttleworth himself and the newest hire. We all work together. There isn't this idea of "What I do is more important than what you do" but more that "What you do is so helpful that I want to make sure what I do is helpful in return" Canonical is really about Ubuntu, the product, and the meaning of brotherhood and working together.