The times for Ubuntu have never been more exciting. Cloud, server, desktop, laptop, TV, tablet, phone - everything runs Ubuntu or is soon going to. This makes developing Ubuntu very special, because fixes which go into Ubuntu in one place will benefit all form factors and all circumstances where it’s used. By improving Ubuntu you make millions of people around the globe happy.

During every 6 month release cycle we run Ubuntu Developer Week. It’s back and we’re going to have it from 29th January to 31st January. During the event we will have online sessions where seasoned Ubuntu developers introduce you to their respective area of expertise or to Ubuntu Development in general.

We will have many great sessions, from hands-on introduction to packaging and Ubuntu development to talks about how to quickly get involved in certain teams and interact with other projects. We will talk about tools and infrastructure, fixing bugs, finding memleaks, working with apps, create Ubuntu images and much much much more. This is the best opportunity to get a feel for how Ubuntu development works, get to know people and ask all the questions you might have.

I talked to a few session hosts, read below what they had to say.

Martin Pitt

Martin Pitt, who will talk about Automated Testing, says: “We_ have been, and are changing the Ubuntu development process to employ automated testing and avoid introducing regressions, and to improve confidence, focus, and development speed. In the first talk I will give an overview about __the various kinds of tests that we do, so that you know where to watch out for failures and get debugging information. The second talk focuses on how to write tests, i.e. which technologies are available for e.g. hardware and GUI __related behaviour or system-wide integration checks."_

Stefano Rivera

Stefano Rivera, who will talk about Upstreams and Debian in particular, said: “So, working effectively in Ubuntu means also working with the teams and people upstream who wrote the software we distribute. I’ll talk about why this is important, when it’s necessary, and how to go about it. In particular, our most important upstream is Debian. Debian has a rather unusual (though powerful) bug-tracker. We’ll cover finding, submitting, and modifying bugs on it.”

Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson, project leader of the Hundred Papercuts Team, says: “Unity may be the shiny new thing that everyone loves, but style without substance is only so much fluff, and the substance of Ubuntu is still its GTK-based apps. Once Hundred Paper Cuts focuses it’s attention on that substance, rubbing out the little annoyances that get under our skin every day we’re using Ubuntu. This session will introduce you to the project, how it works, and how to get involved. If you want to contribute to Ubuntu in a way that has the biggest impact on the quality of experience for the end user, then don’t miss this.”

Bhavani Shankar

Bhavani Shankar, said about his talk about patch systems: “Many a time we wonder how to integrate a particular fix a particular part of the code in a program and upload into repositories without having to change code each time by hand and making it clumsy. In this session I’m going to show how to use different patch management systems that are in practice now.”

About his talk about the app review process in Ubuntu he says: “In this session I’m going to explain the present workflow of reviewing apps and give an introduction into the new app dev upload process to automate reviews.”

The forum we use for this is IRC, as it makes it easy to interact for many people without losing track, you can easily copy/paste and we can save the logs as searchable docs afterwards. You join in by simply connecting to #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

Check out the schedule and find more info on the Ubuntu wiki. We hope to see you all there, please let you friends know too. :-)