Love from Budapest
Jonathan (our Product Strategist) and I attended UDS-O in Budapest last week. Brad, Ian, Huw and Julian also came along for some part of it. And what great feedback we received from Ubuntu contributors! Working on a big and relatively old project like Launchpad can sometime be hard. From within, we are well aware that development is slower than it could be, that we have a lot of tech-debt and a big pile of Critical bugs, not to mention the hundreds of things that we know we could do to make Launchpad more compelling. Working distributed where you interact with users and fellow developers mostly through IRC and email, and sometime voice for “richer” communication makes it even easier to lose the perspective you get when you speak to real users face-to-face.
For me, UDS brought a nice uplifting fresh air (and that’s not a small feat when you know that this is a conference where you have sometime ~400 people in close proximity in the same room 😉 I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of people who thanked us for our performance work or for some other bug fixes we did! From their perspective, Launchpad development is going well and they want more! The performance improvements we did have been noticed! And people were thrilled by the new bug subscription work.
You can get a feel for the atmosphere by watching Jono’s 5-minutes lightning talk. The audience reaction is very much in line with the individual feedback we received.
It’s always great to know your effort are appreciated by your users. Thank to all the folks at UDS. Keep the love coming!
Photo by yixing h. Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
