Last week I was at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, the six-monthly big meetup for Canonical employees and the Ubuntu community to get together and work out what’s in the next version of Ubuntu Linux and how to do it. It was fascinating meeting everyone and seeing it all up close. Lots of stuff went on: I got interviewed by the Ubuntu UK guys for their podcast; I caught up with a few people I hadn’t seen for a while and lots of people I’d never met face-to-face before; I threw together a quick “lifestream” bit of JavaScript which would track a tag across various sites and it ended up on Launchpad (so if you want a trivial way to display a lifestream for a conference, grab the script and make it better); I asked everyone I could think of whether I should insist on buying a laptop with Ubuntu on it and which one I should get; we went to the Computer History Museum and indulged in the geek oneupmanship game of saying “owned one of those, owned one of those, wanted one of those” (apparently the PlayStation 1 is now Computer History); and I drank a fair amount of beer. Was a good week. I was there because I was paid to be so by Canonical. I start work for them at the beginning of January. While there I met the people who will be my team when I start, and saw some of what they’re working on, and I’m really rather excited. I’m going to be part of Online Services. Can’t wait to get going on it. I get to make the desktop I use be better.
Oooh, congrats. That’s half of the lugradio presenters working at Canonical
I still have a ZX Spectrum 48K (which I keep meaning to fire up for my son’s education), an Amiga 500, and a Playstation 1 in the house. Should I open the UK branch of the computer museum? If I had loads of money, that’s one thing I would actually like to do, especially if I could get them all working. I should have kept the Starwriter word processor.
Tom: do not torture current generations of children with the Spectrum. That’s like teaching him to ride a penny farthing. Also, I think http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/ is ahead of you here, although they may take your Spectrum as a donation
No way nice!
I would love to go to to see the UDS and congrats with working at canonical! 
That would be my dream job
Instead i work for sap 
lol but leaving at the end of next year to find a proper job haha
I’ve often wondered if the Spectrum actually wouldn’t be quite a good way to teach at least some children about computers. After all, a smart ten-year-old can basically understand the whole thing top-to-bottom (well, apart from the solid-state physics bits anyway). Modern systems do make it a lot easier to do a lot more from within e.g. Python, but vanishingly few children are going to be able to understand anything close to how the whole computer works because it’s so complex. Where’s our next generation of low-level operating system engineers going to come from, I wonder?
[...] at the Computer History Museum and I ended up talking about this whole lifestreaming thing with Aq. Two things came out of this discussion. First off, UDS seemed to be missing a [...]
[...] Retour sur UDS – Le blogger Stuart Langridge de retour du sommet de développement Ubuntu, nous raconte : « C’était fascinant de rencontrer tout le monde et de voir les choses de près ». Stuart s’est fait interviewer par l’équipe de podcast Ubuntu UK, a pris des nouvelles de personnes qu’il n’avait pas vues depuis un moment, et d’autres qu’il n’avait jamais rencontré en personne. [...]
whatever