Getting your daily dose of juju

One of the first pain points I've been attempting to help smooth out was how Juju is packaged and consumed. The Juju QA Team have put together a new daily ppa you can use, dubbed the Juju Daily ppa. It contains the latest blessed builds from CI testing. Installing this ppa and upgrading regularly allows you to stay in sync with the absolute latest version of Juju that passes our CI testing.

Naturally, this ppa is intended for those who like living on the edge, so it's not recommended for production use. If you find bugs, we'd love to hear about them!

To add the ppa, you will need to add ppa:juju/daily to your software sources.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:juju/daily

Do be aware that adding this ppa will upgrade any version of Juju you may have installed. Also note this ppa contains builds without published streams, so you will need to generate or acquire streams on your own. For most users, this means you should pass --upload-tools during the bootstrap process. However you may also pass the agent-metadata-url and agent-stream as config options. See the ppa description and simplestreams documentation for more details.

Finally, should you wish to revert to a stable version of Juju, you can use the ppa-purge tool to remove the daily ppa and the installed version of Juju.

I'd love to hear your feedback, and encourage you to give it a try.

Reflections

The joys of Spring (or Fall for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere) are now upon us. The change of seasons spurs us to implement our own changes, to start anew. It's a time to reflect on the past, appreciate it, and then do a little Spring cleaning.

As I write this post to you, I'm doing my own reflecting. It's been quite a journey we've undertaken within the QA community. It's not always been easy, but I think we are poised for even greater success with Xenial than Trusty and Precise LTS's. We have continued ramping up our quality efforts to test new platforms, such as the phone and IOT devices, while also implementing automated testing via things like autopkgtest and autopilot. Nevertheless, the desktop images have continued to release like clockwork. We're testing more things, more often, while still managing to raise our quality bar.

I want to thank all of the volunteers who've helped make each of those releases a reality. Oftentimes quality can be a background job, with thank you's going unsaid, while complaints are easy to find. Truly, it's been wonderful learning and hacking on quality efforts with you. So thank you!

So if this post sounds a bit like a farewell, that's because it is. At least in a way. Moving forward, I'll be transitioning to working on a new challenge. Don't worry, I'm keeping my QA hat on, and staying firmly within the realm of ubuntu! However, the time has come to try my hand at a different side of ubuntu. That's right, it's time to head to the last frontier, juju!

I'll be working on improving the quality story for juju, but I believe juju has real opportunities to enable the testing story within ubuntu too. I'm looking forward to the new challenges, and sharing best practices. We're all working on ubuntu at it's heart, no matter our focus.

Moving forward, I'll still be around in my usual haunts. You'll still be able to poke me on IRC, or send me a mail, and I'm certainly still going to be watching what happens within quality with interest. That said, you are much more likely to find me discussing juju, servers and charms in #juju.

As with anything, please feel free to contact me directly if you have any concerns or questions. I plan to wind down my involvement during the next few weeks. I'll be handing off any lingering project roles, and stepping down gracefully. Ubuntu 'Y' will begin anew, with fresh challenges and fresh opportunities. I know there are folks waiting to tackle them!

Prepping for a Summer of Code!

The time to apply is here! Ubuntu has applied for GSOC 2016, but we need project ideas for prospective students, and mentors to mentor them.

What is GSOC?
GSOC stands for Google Summer of Code. The event brings together university students and open source organizations like Ubuntu. It happens over the course of the summer, and mentors mentor students on a one to one basis. Mentors give project ideas, and students select them, pairing up with the mentor to make the idea a reality.

I'll be a mentor!
Mentors need to be around to help a student from May - August. You'll be mentoring a student on the project you propose, so you'll need to be capable of completing the project. As the time commitment is long, it's helpful to have a friend who can pitch in if needed. We've put together all the information you need to know as a mentor on community.u.c, including links to some mentoring guides. This will help give you more details about what to expect.

I'm in. What do I need to do?
To make sure you ideas are included in our application, you need to have them on the Ideas wiki by February 19th, 2016. When you are ready, simply add your idea. It's that simple. Assuming we are accepted as an organization, students will read our ideas, and we'll have a period of time to finalize the details with interested students.

I have a question!
If you have questions about what all this mentoring might entail, feel free to reach out to myself or anyone on the community team. This is a great way to make some needed ideas a reality and grow the community at the same time!

Google Code In 2015: Complete!

Google Code In 2015 is now complete! Overall, we had a total of 215 students finish more than 500 tasks for ubuntu! The students made contributions to documentation, created wallpapers and other art, fixed Unity 7 issues, hacked on the core apps for the phone, performed tests, wrote automated and manual tests, and worked on tools like the qatracker. A big thank you to all of the students and mentors who helped out.

Here's our winners!

 * Daniyaal Rasheed
 * Matthew Allen

And our Finalists

 * Evan McIntire
 * Girish Rawat
 * Malena Vasquez Currie

The students amazed everyone, myself included, with the level and skill they displayed in there work. You all should be very proud. It was lovely to have you as part of the community, and I've been delighted to see some of your faces sticking around and still contributing! Thank you, and welcome to the community!