launchpadblog

Laura:  What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Martin:  I’m on the newly created Blue squad, and we’re on the nebulous task of maintenance at present. I’m also on loan doing some juju development work.

Laura: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Martin:  You can see everything I’ve worked on. Well, all the things where I’ve had the convenience of using launchpad rather than having to send patches by email.

Laura: Where do you work?
Martin:  From home like most of the other developers in Canonical. I’m only a few hours away from the London office, but haven’t been there since the relocation.

Laura: What can you see from your office window?
Martin:  A weeping birch, and whatever feathered things perch atop. Sky, often blue, generally grey. Houses on the other side of the road. This time of year, swift acrobatics.

Laura:  What did you do before working on the Launchpad team?
Martin:   Bazaar! Which is still a pretty key part of how Launchpad works. In between I worked on a cloud api proxy, which has sensibly been dropped in favour of just using the native openstack api.

Laura:  What did you do before working at Canonical?
Martin:  Whatever came up, computer support and some development work.

Laura: How did you get into free software?
Martin:  Mostly from using it, having it break horribly, and getting the urge to make the code actually work.

Laura:  What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Martin:  Principle is more important, otherwise you compromise all the way to  the other side. But you need some pragmatism to get anything done at all.

Laura: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Martin:  I’ve tended to submit changes for anything I use heavily at the time, and to various bzr related projects. I’d use this space to hector some maintainer who’d been sitting on a patch for ages, but everyone’s been organised of late.

Laura:  Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Martin:  It actually works pretty well in lynx!

Laura:  Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
Martin:  You mean apart from making it work better in lynx? I’d like bug search to suck less.

Laura: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
John: I’m the team lead for the Blue squad. Right now our squad is on Maintenance, so I generally do the coordination work of our team with other teams and the system administrators.

Laura: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
John: Before we switched to maintenance, our team was focusing on doing Bazaar work. Within the more recent time, we’ve done stuff like fixing up the Ubuntu Distributed Development package importer, and getting translations for Quantal started for Launchpad.

Laura:Where do you work?
John: I work from home in the Netherlands.

Laura: What can you see from your office window?
John: We have a forest near our house, and some of the other neighbors houses.

Laura: What did you do before working on the Launchpad team?
John: As mentioned, we were focused on development of Bazaar, though arguably that was still part of the Launchpad group (not officially, but in spirit).

Laura: What did you do before working at Canonical?
John: I worked for a company developing medical imaging algorithms, mostly for detection and visualization of disease.

Laura: How did you get into free software?
John: Our team wanted to use something better than CVS for development. At the time SVN was pretty hard to set up, and there was just the beginnings of a couple of tools for distributed version control. I got into tla at the beginning, and was happy when Canonical started Bazaar, and I was able to hack on it.

Laura: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
John: I’m a fairly pragmatic engineer. I think it is good to use principle as a guideline, but in the end if the work isn’t in the hands of people using it, it is providing no benefit and is arguably wasted effort.

Laura: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
John: Well, Launchpad and Bazaar are both pretty clear things (and tla a little bit before that). I also developed some other tools while here at Canonical. Such as Meliae for profiling python memory.

Laura: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
John: The UDD package importer turns the changes from debian packages into real VCS branches that you can do lots of nice stuff on. (annotate the history, log the history, see the graph over time, etc.)

I think we are at about 90% coverage, and you can do “bzr log ubuntu:package” to find out the recent history for a package in ubuntu.

Laura: Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
John: My own personal project with launchpad is improving the connection handling when accessing Bazaar branches. Right now it is approximately 3s just to do the ssh handshake and start talking to codehosting. I have some improvements that should decrease that significantly, but we encounter some strange hanging bugs that are only reproducible in production. And LP’s commitment to having minimal user-visible downtime is particularly problematic for SSH connections. A single HTTP request is less than 5s, but an SSH connection can legitimately be active for an hour if accessing a large project.