Software and technology from Galicia, Spain
I got funding from my employer to attend the GNOME conference, and one of the requirements is that I write a “conference report” mail with a summary of what I got out of it. I’m going to share that email here, with a bit of extra context. If you’re reading my blog — you’re either … Continue reading 22nd July 2026
This month I’m mostly listening to music by Nu Genea, Danalogue and Noon Garden. I’m going to tell you about a big change I’m proposing for folks using Freedesktop SDK to build operating systems. And I’m also going to talk a bit about the GNOME Foundation elections. Maybe I’ll do that first. GNOME Foundation elections … Continue reading Status update, 17th June 2026
I often write about how when stuff works well, you take it for granted. It’s true for technology: when’s the last time you hit a compiler bug in GCC? Once upon a time these were a common thing and you had to choose your C compiler wisely. Yet I haven’t recently seen an article that … Continue reading Status update, 21st May 2026
Hello there, You thought I’d given up on “status update” blog posts, did you ? I haven’t given up, despite my better judgement, this one is just even later than usual. Recently I’ve been using my rather obscure platform as a blogger to theorize about AI and the future of the tech industry, mixed with … Continue reading Status update, 23rd April 2026
Hello there, If you’re an avid reader of blogs, you’ll know this medium is basically dead now. Everyone switched to making YouTube videos, complete with cuts and costume changes every few seconds because, I guess, our brains work much faster now. The YouTube recommendation algorithm, problematic as it is, does turn up some interesting stuff, … Continue reading Status update, 21st March 2026
Its moments of change that remain striking in your memory when you look back. I feel like i’m in a long period of change, and if like me you participate in the tech industry and open source then you probably feel the same. It’s going to be a wild time to look back on. As … Continue reading Status update, 23rd February 2026
Its a crazy time to be part of the tech world. I’m happy to be sat on the fringes here but I want to try and capture a bit of the madness, so in a few years we can look back on this blogpost and think “Oh yes, shit was wild in 2026”. (insert some … Continue reading AI predictions for 2026
Happy new year, ye bunch of good folks who follow my blog. I ain’t got a huge bag of stuff to announce. It’s raining like January. I’ve been pretty busy with work amongst other things, doing stuff with operating systems but mostly internal work, and mostly management and planning at that. We did make an … Continue reading Status update, 21st January 2026
Like many software engineers, I sometimes see my career as 20 years of failing to become a professional musician. Although its true that in the software industry we get to stay in better hotels than most independent musicians can afford. And we rarely have to work Saturday nights. Its difficult to combine two passions sometimes, … Continue reading Musical update
Welcome to mid-December! Where I am this month is a pretty cold affair… at night it’s 2 or 3 degrees above freezing. Maybe you’re in a tropical place and the nights are 30 degrees warmer. Or maybe you’re somewhere that drops down to 20 or 30 below freezing. The world is a big place! (Or … Continue reading Status update, 17/12/2025
I am spending the evening deleting my Github.com account. There are plenty of reasons you might want to delete your Github account. I’d love to say that this is a coherently orchestrated boycott on my part, in sympathy with the No Azure for Apartheid movement. Microsoft, owner of Github, is a big pile of cash … Continue reading Bollocks to Github
Bo día. I am writing this from a high speed train heading towards Madrid, en route to Manchester. I have a mild hangover, and a two hundred page printout of “The STPA Handbook”… so I will have no problem sleeping through the journey. I think the only thing keeping me awake is the stunning view. … Continue reading Status update — 23/11/2025
Good morning! I spent some time figuring out why my build PC was running so slowly today. Thanks to some help from my very smart colleagues I came up with this testcase in Nushell to measure CPU performance: We are copying 10MB of random data into a file and compressing it with bzip2. 0.55 seconds … Continue reading Slow Fedora VMs
Greetings readers. I’m writing to you from a hotel room in Manchester which I’m currently sharing with a variant of COVID 19. We are listening to disco funk music. This virus prevents me from working or socializing, but I at least I have time to do some cyber-janitorial tasks like updating my “dotfiles” (which holds … Continue reading Status update, 17/10/2025
For the first time in many years I can talk publicly about what I’m doing at work: a short engagement funded by Endless and Codethink to rebuild Endless OS as a GNOME OS derivative, instead of a Debian derivative. There is nothing wrong with Debian, of course, just that today GNOME OS aligns more closely … Continue reading Status update, 22/09/2025
Hello! I’m working on an interesting project this month, related to open source Linux operating systems. Actually I’m not working on it this week, I’m instead battling with vinyl floor tiles. Don’t let anyone tell you they are easy to fit. But I think on the 5th attempt I’ve got the technique. The wooden mallet … Continue reading Status update, 19/08/2025
Greetings readers of the future from my favourite open technology event of the year. I am hanging out with the people who develop the GNOME platform talking about interesting stuff. Being realistic, I won’t have time to make a readable writeup of the event. So I’m going to set myself a challenge: how much can … Continue reading Thoughts during GUADEC 2025
This month has involved very little programming and a huge amount of writing. I am accidentally writing a long-form novel about openQA testing. It’s up to 1000 words already and we’re still on the basics. The idea was to prepare for my talk at the GNOME conference this year called “Let’s build an openQA testsuite, … Continue reading Status update, 15/07/2025
I am a long time user of the Fedora operating system. It’s very good quality, with a lot of funding from Red Hat (who use it to crowd-source testing for their commercial product Red Hat Enterprise Linux). On Fedora you use a command named dnf to install and remove packages. The absolute worst design decision … Continue reading dnf uninstall
This month I created a personal data map where I tried to list all my important digital identities. (It’s actually now a spreadsheet, which I’ll show you later. I didn’t want to start the blog post with something as dry as a screenshot of a spreadsheet.) Anyway, I made my personal data map for several … Continue reading Status update, 15/06/2025