2013 in review

2013 started with what felt like a failure, but in the end, I believe that the
best decision was made.  During 2011 and 2012 I worked on and then managed
the Unity desktop team.  This was a C++ project that brought me back to my
hard-core hacker side after four and a half years on Launchpad.  The Unity
desktop was a C++ project using glib, nux, and Compiz. After bringing Unity to
be the default desktop in 12.04 and ushering in the stability and performance
improvements, the decision was made to not use it as the way to bring the
Ubuntu convergence story forward. At the time I was very close tho the Unity 7
codebase and I had an enthusiastic capable team working on it. The decision
was to move forwards with a QML based user interface.  I can see now that this
was the correct decision, and in fact I could see it back in January, but that
didn't make it any easier to swallow.

I felt that I was at a juncture and I had to move on.  Either I stayed with
Canonical and took another position or I found something else to do. I do like
the vision that Mark has for Ubuntu and the convergence story and I wanted to
hang around for it even if I wasn't going to actively work on the story itself.  For a while I was interested in learning a new programming language, and Go was considered the new hotness, so I looked for a position working on Juju. I was lucky to be able to join the the juju-core team.

After a two weak break in January to go to a family wedding, I came back to
work and started reading around Go. I started with the language specification
and then read around and started with the Go playground. Then started with the
Juju source.

Go was a very interesting language to move to from C++ and Python. No
inheritance, no exceptions, no generics. I found this quite a change.  I even
blogged about some of these frustrations.

As much as I love the C++ language, it is a huge and complex language. One
where you are extremely lucky if you are working with other really competent
developers. C++ is the sort of language where you have a huge amount of power and control, but you pay other costs for that power and control. Most C++ code is pretty terrible.

Go, as a contrast, is a much smaller, more compact, language. You can keep the
entire language specification in your head relatively easily. Some of this is
due to specific decisions to keep the language tight and small, and others I'm
sure are due to the language being young and immature. I still hope for
generics of some form to make it into the language because I feel that they
are a core building block that is missing.

I cut my teeth in Juju on small things. Refactoring here, tweaking
there. Moving on to more substantial changes.  The biggest bit that leaps to
mind is working with Ian to bring LXC containers and the local provider to the
Go version of Juju.  Other smaller things were adding much more infrastructure
around the help mechanism, adding plugin support, refactoring the provisioner,
extending the logging, and recently, adding KVM container support.

Now for the obligatory 2014 predictions...

I will continue working on the core Juju product bringing new and wonderful
features that will only be beneficial to that very small percentage of
developers in the world who actually deal with cloud deployments.

Juju will gain more industry support outside just Canonical, and will be seen
as the easiest way to OpenStack clouds.

I will become more proficient in Go, but will most likely still be complaining
about the lack of generics at the end of 2014.

Ubuntu phone will ship.  I'm guessing on more than just one device and with
more than one carrier. Now I do have to say that these are just personal
predictions and I have no more insight into the Ubuntu phone process than
anyone outside Canonical.

The tablet form-factor will become more mature and all the core applications,
both those developed by Canonical and all the community contributed core
applications will support the form-factor switching on the fly.

The Unity 8 desktop that will be based on the same codebase as the phone and
tablet will be available on the desktop, and will become the way that people
work with the new very high resolution laptops.