What our engineers enjoy about working at Canonical
- 1. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? Identifying and solving challenges. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical Ubuntu Core and snap for revolutionising the way software is packaged (or not, in reality) and distributed. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? I think we share the desire for relevant challenges and elegant solutions. Celso Providelo Engineering Manager, Brazil What does open source mean to you as an engineer? No artificial barriers, no obstacles, to make things better. How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Put simply, I try to not block my peers or users depending on my work. “What made me join Canonical was the freedom and the ability to innovate.”
- 2. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? I like being able to make developers’ lives easier. I like being able to concentrate on the best technical solution for the job. I like fixing bugs and incremental improvements: at heart I prefer evolving existing software over writing things from scratch. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical Over twelve years there’s a lot to choose from: the first Ubuntu release was an amazing amount of work behind the scenes, writing the graphical installer was tough, and integrating our UEFI Secure Boot support was both politically and technically challenging. But the most challenging and rewarding was adding Git code hosting support to Launchpad. the go at once so that if I’m temporarily blocked on one of them then I can easily switch to another. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? We have far more engineers these days than I can possibly know personally, but at least within my department we may disagree on details but share a preference for systems that just Work and that we can debug easily. On the whole I like not necessarily having too much in common though: diversity is a good thing, both on principle and because it tends to produce better results. Colin Watson Software Engineer, USA What does open source mean to you as an engineer? It's absolutely vital. On one level, of course, it just makes everything easier not to have to keep things secret and not to have to worry about strange licensing issues with getting code to users. But it’s also more collegial, and most importantly I strongly believe that it’s ethically better to produce free software than non-free software. Of course not everyone gets to have employment in line with their ethics, but I’m glad to have that privilege.’ How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? A combination of the Launchpad bug tracking system, Trello cards, what users are cross about, what my manager is concerned about, and which bit of infrastructure work will unblock the largest chunk of other work. I normally try to have two or three projects on “I was one of the first employees, Mark phoned me and was very enthusiastic about this amazing Debian-based project he was starting. I was unsure whether I wanted to risk going to work for a startup. I decided I’d kick myself if I didn’t (I was right).”
- 3. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? I enjoy people telling me the ways that my work has helped them. I maintain an open source CSS quality tool called Parker, and nothing makes me smile more than when people tell me how it has helped them fix problems with their stylesheets. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical Creating a new React / Redux app from scratch. Frontend development has been progressing at a frightening pace for years, and learning about the fundamentals that underpin React apps has been very educational. I learned a lot about Redux, server-side rendering, CSS Modules among many other new technologies. Katie Fenn Software Engineer, UK What does open source mean to you as an engineer? Passing on my knowledge and expertise to enable others. How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Making daily notes when I have a lot of work on-the-go helps me remember all the tasks I have to juggle. Keeping open lines of communication with the people I work with also helps balance work across the team. If something is blocking me from working, it’s likely my colleagues have a valuable insight to help. “I contribute to open software and conferences regularly, so Canonical stood up as a company which plays a big role in the community. I’ve also been a user of Ubuntu since Breezy Badge, working with Canonical is very exciting.” What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? A curiosity and a love of technology.
- 4. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? I like to approach the challenges I face as puzzles. Solving these problems (designing an application and programming it) are like solving puzzles for me. And I like to see how the idea of solution that I have in my head comes to life after being programmed. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical When I joined I started working on a big project with a long history. So, the biggest challenge there was to find a compromise between the restrictions the legacy code was creating and the new modern front-end tools and technologies we wanted to use. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? I think we all share the care and attention to details and building solid and well architectured solutions. Also, pragmatism – to deliver simple solutions in order to solve problems of our users. Bartek Szopka Software Engineer, Poland What does open source mean to you as an engineer? For me open source is about sharing. Sharing both in terms of making your tool or application available to others to use, but most importantly sharing the knowledge about how it’s built (as far as the source code is concerned). This helps others learn from the code, adapt it to their needs, help to find or fix issues, or build even better tools on top of it. How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? In the team we prioritise the work based on the requirements and the deadlines we have. We plan by splitting the work into manageable tasks and we adapt whenever we face any problems. “I’ve been an Ubuntu user for 10 years. I like the values Canonical stands for (open source, sharing, education). I also really like what the Ubuntu design team do (responsive design and front-end engineering).”
- 5. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? I like the idea that issues can be expressed and solved in an automated fashion within the confines of coding and tooling. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical I don’t think I can mention customer names but I am enjoying dealing with issues of scale in new and interesting ways. Ben Kaehne Cloud Reliability Engineer, Australia What does open source mean to you as an engineer? Open source has a good word play right there. The source is open. In some capacity or another. People are able to obtain, modify and run other exercises within the confines of the license of the software. This kind of runs a two way street for many open source projects. The entity that originally generated the product is able to expand their pool of programmers outside of thier core team; gaining the ability to rapidly develop fixes and new features. While those who are not neccessarily core – contributors may lack the social ‘pull’ in order to have thier changes implemented. The idea that anyone can ‘change the software’ often generates lots of healthy discussion around the product though. “The telecommute aspect was probably the primary drive at Canonical. Though working for an ever trending organisation is great. ‘The makers of Ubuntu’, and much more.” How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? We are given general rules of prioritisations from management. From there I often manage my time using pomodoro timers. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? We all work telecommute. It is pretty great, and we are all great communicators which is what really helps drive this company as a whole.
- 6. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? It’s the problem and the solving part of it. I really enjoy finding the root causes of problems and fixing them. What does open source mean to you as an engineer? For me, its about being able to find software available ‘in the open’ to solve an issue and being able to look into the source code for clarity and customisation. Para Siva Software Engineer, UK How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? The priorities of the team are also my priorities. I believe that being agile in terms of picking up a task and completing it based on its priority for the team, should be how it’s done and that is how I deal with priorities. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? Passion for quality, I suppose. I see most of us are very committed to working towards the goals set by the senior management team. “I joined Canonical mainly due to the connection to Linux, which I always wanted to engage with. Also, a couple of my respectable ex-colleagues working at Canonical made me want to join the company.”
- 7. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? Making things work, making peoples lives easier and simpler, automating repetitive tasks, fixing things, and facing new challenges. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical All projects pose a challenge, but the hardest was probably Launchpad. What does open source mean to you as an engineer? Visibility, sharing, learning, understanding, flexibility. Maximiliano Bertacchini Software Engineer, Argentina How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Urgent first! :-) My manager is always ready to help as well, fortunately. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? Besides all the basic technical knowledge (Linux, Python, and software development in general), I believe we share values such as high quality standards, perfectionism, pragmatism and a passion for open source. “Quite a few friends and colleagues of mine have worked at Canonical for several years, and they always seem happy and proud of that. When heard of an opening as an Online Services software engineer, I didn’t think twice.”
- 8. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? Organizing my own time to do things, without hourly interruptions I would face in an office. This is critical for any engineering task. You want that when you have to think for a while before coming up with a solution to some new, challenging problem. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical I joined the Online Services team in the middle of a company reorganazation. I had to deliver important changes to the payment service infrastructure without much help. I had to figure things out mostly on my own due to lots of new software components I haven’t been exposed to until then. Caio Begotti Software Engineer, Brazil What does open source mean to you as an engineer? The only truly effective way in the long– term for any computational solution. It�s evolution applied to computers. How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Constant feedback and touch–basing with managers, stakeholders. What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? Self-sufficiency and knowledge to understand what needs to be done. “I joined Canonical mainly because of the possibility of having an impact in people’s lives with open source software.”
- 9. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? The ability to work on improving automation, monitoring for our production deployments... then in all honesty the adrenaline shot when firefighting outages, with the added value of the debugging experience as a learning one. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical For the BootStack project, we had to develop a set of tools to ‘generalize’ the deployment of Openstack clouds (given the toolset we had at that time, c.a. end of 2014) in a rather short timeframe, then being able to use them for production deployments a couple months afterwards. Juanjo Ciarlante Cloud Reliabiility Engineer, Argentina What does open source mean to you as an engineer? For me FOSS is key of your own growth (as learning experience), freedom (not becoming dependent on proprietary / in-house tools), and ability to share your experience and knowledge with other colleagues, with the FOSS community, etc.’ How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Being part of a Reliability Engineering team, we have specific processes around workload prioritisation, based on ticket queues for operational tasks and/or engineering projects. “Coming from a very proprietary working environment, being able to come back to work with FOSS tools, with all the synergy involved (ability to share my knowledge, improve these back to the FOSS community, etc) was the main reason I chose Canonical.” What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? I guess the passion to learn, use and improve tools for the whole FOSS community.
- 10. What do you enjoy about being an engineer? The freedom to pursue various aspect of the product the Canonical develops and assisting in specifying hardware used in its architecture. Tell me about the most challenging engineering project you had to deal with at Canonical During the phone/tablet development I had to devise a way for other engineers to remotely control a handset in the datacenter. Rick Fowler Data Centre Engineer, USA What does open source mean to you as an engineer? The ability to view code from a particular project and improve on it. Then submit it back to the world for others to use or improve some more. How do you prioritise the workload at Canonical? Mostly when there is a time crunch for a particular project I will focus on that unless told otherwise. “I joined as my neighbor worked for Canonical at the time and I had always wanted to work for an open source company.” What would you say that you have in common with the rest of the engineering team? A desire to architect, setup and physically run the hardware that the company develops on as well as has production services on.