Safe as Milk

A post by Amanda McPherson about her best interviewing tip over on LinkedIn got me thinking about an interview technique I was taught while on the GNOME board many years ago by Jonathan Blandford: Focus on behavior. In jobs related to product management, business development, sales, marketing or communications, you  have people who are verbally […]

We are pleased to announce the Call for Participation in the FOSDEM 2015 Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization DevRoom! Important dates: Nov 18: Deadline for submissions Dec 1: Speakers notified of acceptance Dec 5: Schedule published This year the DevRoom topics will cover two distinct fields: Software Defined Networking (SDN), covering virtual switching, […]

Over on Google+, Aaron Seigo in his inimitable way launched a discussion about  people who call themselves community managers.. In his words: “the “community manager” role that is increasingly common in the free software world is a fraud and a farce”. As you would expect when casting aspertions on people whose job is to talk […]

One in a series of indeterminate length I am calling “mostly unimportant questions which take an inordinate amount of time to resolve when releasing a project as free software”. For the next topic, I’m hesitating between “naming”, “logo/icon/mascot design” and “mailing lists or forums”.   Choosing a license Free software projects need licenses. But choosing […]

There are times in a long career when you have to turn your back on what’s gone before. In work, this is easy. People stop giving you a paycheck, you stop turning up to work. And yet, some of my best friends are people I worked with 10 years ago. In open source, it’s harder. […]

With my colleague Keith Basil, the OpenStack  product manager here at Red hat, I will be giving a “webinar” about OpenStack, and Red Hat’s community-driven distribution of it, RDO, this Wednesday at 3pm UTC (5pm CEST, 11am EDT, 8am PDT, other timezones). We will cover what OpenStack is, at a high level, why Red Hat [...]

For anyone who saw the recent launch of the new oVirt website a while back and was wondering how we could make such an attractive theme and lay-out for a MediaWiki wiki, wonder no more. In fact, you don’t even have to be jealous! Because the theme, called Strapping, so called because it’s based on [...]

Via Simon Phipps, I discovered PlayTerm this morning. You can record and play back terminal sessions, which allow you to show commands and their expected output, played at typed speed. This may be the greatest invention since screencasts.

I spoke to Kevin Carillo about what makes a good community citizen a few months ago – he had already been working for some time on his research at that point, and I thought that his approach and ideas were interesting. Recently, he blogged about his work, and released a survey targeting recent contributors to [...]

This week I was reminded that the first step in an Open Source project is often the hardest.We’ve been using MediaWiki for a project at work, with the “ConfirmAccount” extension to deal with spammers – a very nice extension indeed! It adds account creation requests to a queue where they can be handled by members [...]

Fancy yourself as a smartypants who knows everything there is to know about everything? Could you name all the cities who have had two or more soccer teams win a European club tournament? Or name the artist and song that kept “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” off the number one spot in the UK [...]

This Summer, on July 28th, I’ll be running a 60km mountain trail race in La Plagne in the Alps, the 6000D. And to provide myself with an added incentive, and to give back something to an organisation that has helped my family in the past, I will be raising money for Muscular Dystrophy Ireland in [...]