As of the beginning of the April I am a Xamarin (that is what Xamarin employees call themselves).

At Xummit I met the rest of the Xamarins and I had an incredible time there (dare I say magical ♥).
I met old friends like Rodrigo Moya, Jason Smith, David Siegel, Cody Russell, Neil Patel, Connor Curran, Gord Allot and others, but also made new friends:

• Zack Gramana: The right amount of crazy and creative. He is helping me with my new pet project.
• Seth Rosetter: SF chilled out hacker with an ear for techno and extreme positive attitude, a delight to hang out with.
• Mike Krüger: One of the friendliest people I got to meet and know with exactly my kind of humour.
• Victoria Grothey: Incredibly nice person with lots of energy and always smiling.
• Marek Safar: The most passionate beer expert I know I guess. Also rumour has it that either I am stalking him or he is stalking me.
• Václav Vančura: An awesome designer who motivated me to start drawing again. Thanks for that. And many many more.

One thing I believe in, is that interpersonal relationships between co-workers is a must for a community or a company to be productive and successful. Xamarin promoted (and still promotes) this positive habit, achieved it and even more. The upbeat attitude and enthusiasm at Xamarin is infectious. Combined with the diversity in culture as well as stuff/tasks to do brings the best out of Xamarins. I will not forget the bus ride to the venue. 8 people with 7 different nationalities, but all happy and psyched about what they are doing and what others are doing ♥.

Since I joined Xamarin I started doing more Mono in my free time too. Currently I am porting

Synapse to Mac (since I loved the interface and some of the functionalities I couldn’t find in Alfred and Quicksilver). Here is a small very early sneak peak :)

I am loving Xamarin and all its stands for and brings to the table.

P.S: Hylke Bons has a fan base here at Xamarin :)

I have lots of positive things to say about the OpenStack community. They managed to create a great mixture of professional yet agile and FLOSSy. Amazing CI/CD and devstack is just an awesome way to kickstart development on OpenStack.

Last month I discovered Marconi (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Marconi)...

Basically its a new MQ written in pure Python and allos different backends. The awesome thing is you can run it without having to run the whole openstack stuff and it works... It is still a young project but the community around it its awesome ans their IRC #openstack-marconi is very responsive. These guys could use a hand so if you are a Python enthusiast or want to hack on something OpenStack related without needing to have the whole stack running, please show some support and try to help out. There is a lot of low hanging fruit (https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack/marconi) :)

I am entitled to my opinion and in my honest opinion: scrum sucks big time

Here is why (again my opinion).

• Does not empower developers to become creative. Good way to sell that the developers are doing something (so that failure is not their fault) even if running around in circles ==> plausible deniability

• Highly motivated developers are limited from jumping out of the “plan” to hack on other project related stuff (even doing so in free time is regarded wrong since you are not sticking to a plan). Thus limiting the personal success story and relying on motivation to come from team achievements. So being a weak link in a team just makes matters worse.

• The “Daily Stand-up" routine is not productive in its defined structure of:

  • What did I accomplish yesterday? Tried to finish a story. Ran out of time.
  • What will I do today? Will try to finish this story.
  • What obstacles are impeding my progress? This meeting, the circle jerk around legacy code and the dude demanding me to discuss every merge request before submitting it. (Just accept/deny with a comment - thank you ;) )

• Stories over quality: Developers are keen to finish as much stories as possible which could to take a toll on the quality.

• Not applicable on a distributed community of volunteers, or when dependency on open source community exist.

• Time-boxed problem solving does not guarantee best possible outcome.

• The commitment: One of the reason Scrum fails is its approach on commitment. "Deliver the maximum value of stories in a specific time frame”. As soon as the team can not agree on committing to a story all other stories with lower priority are ignored. And once done with those stories you pick the one out of the backlog that you couldn’t agree on (Since it has the highest priority) and waste time on it. You can’t skip this story since it has the highest priority. To me this is like sitting in an exam and being stuck on a problem. Instead of moving to the next problem with the hope of gathering as much points as possible, one decided to be stubborn and try fucking with that problem. That is just stupid. Now assume I solved the problem. Scrum now forces me to pick something from the backlog. And not anything. But the one with the highest priority and again waste time being stuck on that until the time ends. If would have adapted this style of tackling problems during school I would have never passed.

Don't get me wrong Scrum can work don't know how personally but I do believe it can work with the right team and people, however what are the chances of it succeeding if 2 or more of the following apply:

• You don't have full control of the stack (dependency on third party)

• Your developers are not all on the same level of expertise and knowledge.

• Shoehorned into an ongoing running process and code base.

• Stories of the team are not focused on a specific topic but on the general delivery of the whole project.

I look at GNOME, Mozilla and the Kernel. They don’t follow this methodology and stuff happens and gets delivered. So much big companies can learn from FLOSS.

The last year has been a rough year. I started working for Deutsche Telekom (with a bunch of other FLOSS developers) on OpenStack. What started off as developing new features upstream ended up being more or less devops stuff (mainly Puppet and orchestration) which is not really my style.

During that time I was working on GNOME Music, I enjoyed developing it a lot, the students and the team are just amazing but I was growing unhappy with the external micromanagement that I experienced which personally stressed me and made me feel unappreciated for what I think I can bring to the table. What started off as a hobby became a burden, so at GUADEC I decided to spend time away from GNOME. Strangely enough I started feeling better, I took things a step further and switched to Mac and noticed what a long road we have for the Linux desktop. I became more convinced that the focus of delivering an experience for the desktop or mobile market is misplaced and we missed both trains. The only way for GNOME to continue being relevant is to either start focusing on wearable experience or focus on marketing the technology first then the experience. Get GNOME tech on other platforms and wearables.

Anyhow being unhappy can take a toll on the mental and physical health, I became a bit depressed and negative person and my health was declining. I went through this a couple of years ago when my father passed away and found an escape contributing to GNOME and FLOSS. So with that some decision had to be taken.

Somehow I can’t see myself actively contributing to GNOME anymore and maybe its for the best. I’ll be around and will help out when I can if asked directly. But I won’t be running GNOME actively.

I am also taking time off contributing to Mozilla. However I do see myself coming back soon since I am missing it already. I really enjoy the compatibility team (where we use some GNOME technologies including GI) and the community building team.
I will continue maintaining Zeitgeist but there will be no active feature development. After almost 6 years we all moved on and Zeitgeist is feature complete.

I quit my job. I am on a nice vacation for a bit and will be starting my new job sooner than expected. With a help of friends and my girl-friend I started getting my self-esteem back and all is better again.

Feeling better already :D (No depression)

Quite some years ago (I dare not count!) I gave my wife a small ASCII racing game as a present, just for her. It had quite some nostalgic value attached

Today I finished a quick port of the old code and just now ASCII RACER got public on Google Play. Free, no ads. I did the port using the awesome game library libgdx.

With Minecraft, Flappy Bird, et al the game pixel count is going down and down, and pixelated is == cool; so why not go further!? ASCII art, here we go.

The code base is pretty fun to work on – so I might even be putting up some feature expansions and bug fixes The random level generation is based on a signal processing kinda idea. It emits a stable signal and then dynamically applies a set of perturbations to that stable signal. I could go on! – but I think you should just take the game for a spin in stead!

Here’s a pro tip for writing great API documentation: Do not write for a novice audience, write as if you’re addressing an expert.

Some of the nasty questions an expert would need answers on could be:

• What happens on weird input? What happens if I put null, 0, the empty string, etc?
• Any particular exceptions that could bubble up?
• Can improper use cause resource leaks?
• Are there any conditions where the result is undefined?
• Is it thread safe?
• Is it re-entrant?
• What are the performance characteristics?
• Are there any non-obvious side effects?

Make it short and precise, not friendly and verbose. If something is obviously implied from the context, leave it out or make a brief note in the class header. Forcing yourself to imagine being questioned by this annoying expert is also a way to find corners where your code could use polish.

Novices will probably benefit more from a tutorial style document and once they get ambitious they will need the answers anyway – even though they might not understand the questions yet!

Finally managed to move away from Wordpress. One of the reasons I did less blogging is that I felt that Wordpress became more of a CMS and less of a blogging platform.

I stumbled upon ghost which I must say is just awesome... Its done for blogging and blogging only :D

I will be bloging more again now. Recently I have been more active doing upstream openstack development and some sweet Mozilla hacks.
Stay tuned...

What is Zeitgeist?
---------------------------------------

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users's activities and events,
anywhere from files opened to websites
visited and conversations, and makes this information readily
available for other applications to use. It is also
able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and
usage patterns.

Where can you get it?
-------------------------------

https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.9/0.9.14

What has changed?
--------------------------

Libzeitgeist:
   - Fix managing and tracking registered Monitors

This release is the sixth beta which will lead to zeitgeist 1.0

Before I start blogging about the progress of GNOME Music, I would like to announce my happiness (as well as the whole gnome music team) that we now have 3 students sponsored to hack on GNOME Music. Eslam Mostafa (SoC), Shivani Podar (OWP) and Sai Suman Prayaga (SoC) all three of them deserved they internships, showing dedication and patching like crazy before SoC, keeping Vadim, Guillaume and me very busy.

Also I would like to welcome Arnel Borja and Fabiano Fidêncio to the team with their immense contributions, and ofcourse the allmighty Giovanni Campagna (who hacks everything in GNOME by now)

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic here, nevertheless we triumphed over phase of one of developing GNOME Music:

• Set basic infrastructure
• Implement Grilo Querying
• Implement Albums View
• Implement Songs View
• Implement Artist View
• Implement Playback support
• Clean up and port to Glade

Now phase 2 is shaping up nicely:

• Implement Playlist View
• Implement Selection functionality on all views
• Implement Repeat/Shuffle
• Implement Actions
• Clean up

So if you are interested in joining us with the development please feel free to hang out with us on #gnome-music on irc.gnome.org

Currently its only usable via JHbuild. Anyhow for more info like code and bugzilla check out https://live.gnome.org/Music

Here are some screenshots for tempting :D

Before I start blogging about the progress of GNOME Music, I would like to announce my happiness (as well as the whole gnome music team) that we now have 3 students sponsored to hack on GNOME Music. Eslam Mostafa (SoC), Shivani Podar (OWP) and Sai Suman Prayaga (SoC) all three of them deserved they internships, showing dedication and patching like crazy before SoC, keeping Vadim, Guillaume and me very busy.

Also I would like to welcome Arnel Borja and Fabiano Fidêncio to the team with their immense contributions, and ofcourse the allmighty Giovanni Campagna (who hacks everything in GNOME by now)

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic here, nevertheless we triumphed over phase of one of developing GNOME Music:

• Set basic infrastructure
• Implement Grilo Querying
• Implement Albums View
• Implement Songs View
• Implement Artist View
• Implement Playback support
• Clean up and port to Glade

Now phase 2 is shaping up nicely:

• Implement Playlist View
• Implement Selection functionality on all views
• Implement Repeat/Shuffle
• Implement Actions
• Clean up

So if you are interested in joining us with the development please feel free to hang out with us on #gnome-music on irc.gnome.org

Currently its only usable via JHbuild. Anyhow for more info like code and bugzilla check out https://live.gnome.org/Music

Here are some screenshots for tempting