Quick update to point you all to Ineke & Michiel's website where the first wedding pictures have started appearing. More will follow. Also, it's no longer a site with our wedding invitation (it is archived, however), but also intended to host more info, pictures and other loose ends about us.

Location: Home

Wat is het rustig hier langs de singel in het park als Nederland moet voetballen!
Dat gaf mij mooi de tijd om eens even rustig een meerkoet-nest en een familie dinerende knobbelzwanen op de foto te zetten.

We interrupt this broadcast for a public service announcement.

Friday the 2nd of July 2010 at 13:00h CET, Michiel Scholten and Ineke Post got married at Castle Assumburg and became mr and mrs Scholten. Lots of pictures were taken, lots of fun was had. Pictures will follow.

Thank you for your time; we will now continue the regular broadcast.

Location: Home

For about 6 months now I've been working for Canonical on the Soyuz component of Launchpad. Like most other engineers at Canonical I don't work at the office but from a desk at home, as our nearest office is in London, not really a distance that is feasible for a commute. I do work at regular hours during work days and stay in touch with my colleagues using IRC and voice over IP.

I did have some experience working on contracts and study assignments from home previously, but working a fulltime regular job has turned out to be a bigger challenge. It seems easy enough. No travel time, every day is casual Friday, being able to listen to obscure death metal all day without driving coworkers crazy. Awesome, right?

Well, not entirely. I can't say I wasn't warned beforehand (I was) but I still ran head-first into some of the common mistakes.

Fortunately we regularly have sprints at different locations around the world and, apart from appealing to the travel junkie in me, that brings some essential face time with coworkers. Electronic communication mechanisms such as mailing lists, IRC, Skype and, more recently, mumble also help make the rest of the company feel closer, but it's still very different from being able to talk to people at the water cooler (the point of which, btw, still escapes me. What's wrong with proper cold tap water?).

What also seems to help is going into the city and meeting up with others for lunch, or even just to get groceries.

This is at least partially related to the fact that I am a compulsive multi-tasker; I always do several things at once and context-switch every minute or so (prompted by e.g. having to wait for code to compile), including checking email and responding to conversations on IRC and Google Talk. This, among other things, has the effect that I respond quite slowly in IRC/IM conversations; if you've ever chatted with me you've probably noticed it. Multi-tasking has always worked well for me - despite research suggesting otherwise - because software development always involves a lot of waiting (for vcses, compilers, testsuites, ...).

Recently I've tried to eliminate some of the other distractions by signing out off Skype, Empathy (Google Talk, MSN, etc) and Google reader completely and only checking email a couple of times per day.

I am hard core, so during my first months I used my lunch breaks and evenings to hack on other free software projects, triaging bug reports that had come in or reviewing patches. Despite the fact that this is indeed technically a break from Launchpad, it didn't (surprise!) seem to work as well as stepping away from the computer completely. Also, it turns out that spending 14 hours a day programming doesn't make you all that much more productive than working a couple of hours less.

What I've discovered recently is that getting at least one branch done by the end of each day, even if it's just by fixing a trivial bug, helps tremendously in giving me some sense of accomplishment. Julian also wrote a blog post with some useful hints on feeling productive a while ago.

What is your experience working from home? Any good tips?

cp: Sieges Even - Unbreakable

As I have done in previous years, I am again participating in the Google Summer of Code as mentor for the Samba project.

Last year I Andrew and I co-mentored three students with mixed results. In the end we had to drop one of our students but the other two did well. I've only taken on one student this year for various reasons.

The amount of time required to mentor a student varies wildly depending on the student and is hard to predict based on their application. Some students seem to require quite a lot of mentoring while others are self-motivated and self-learning. This has not just been my experience, I've heard similar stories from fellow mentors on other projects.

Last summer Ricardo worked on SWAT for Samba 4 and he is still actively working on the project, even after the Summer of Code has finished. I hope to find the time to package SWAT in time for Debian Squeeze. At the moment SWAT just supports managing shares but Ricardo is working on user management.

In 2009 Calin worked on the GTK+ frontends for Samba, in particular changing them to be Python-based rather than C-based. This year his work is going to be continued by Sergio, hopefully with the some user-ready tools as the end result.

cp: Gazpacho - 117

Seeing this makes me very happy. It's taken us a couple of years to get to this point but we've finally made it, mostly thanks to the dedication and persistence of Julien and Brad.