Time to Cook!

It looks like we're spending a lot more time around the house, cooking for ourselves.

Kim and I truly love eating out -- in fact we have reservations at The French Laundry in May, though we're fairly certain that's not going to work out :-(

But, as much as I love eating out, I love cooking, too.  Here's a few of my favorite books, on my shelf right now:

1. The Joy of Cooking -- Irma Rombauer
• In my humble opinion, this is the one single cooking tome you need more than any other.  It's my bible of cooking.  If it's not in here, it's nowhere!
2. Modernist Cuisine at Home -- Nathan Myhrvold
• It's a science textbook, but for cooking.  And cooking gadgets and gizmos.  Absolutely phenomenal.  Gorgeous pictures.  Thorough explanations of every corner of cooking science.  Every time I open it, I'm sucked into hours of reading.
3. Franklin Barbeque - A Meat-smoking Manifesto -- Aaron Franklin
• I've smoked meat for a long time, longer, in fact, than Aaron Franklin himself, as detailed in his origin story at the beginning of his book.  But my approaches changed, for the better, after reading his manifesto.  So, so, so good.
4. The Keto Paleo Kitchen -- Vivica Menegaz
• A few years ago, as I started approaching 40, carbs somehow became my nemesis.  They just don't come off like they used to.  Fortunately, there's a cure...  And it involves replacing those carbs with protein, delicious meats, and vegetables.  This is a awesome set of delicious recipes, each one better than the last.  Highly recommend!
5. The Noma Guide to Fermentation -- Rene Redzepi
• Kim and I had the privilege of eating at Noma last year.  It was almost a religious experience.  Now, on a separate note, I love beer.  Especially that weird corner of beer, called sour, funky beer.  This book is actually the remarkable cross section of those two passions of mine.  In this book, Rene Redzepi meticulously documents hundreds of different foods, vegetables, meats, herbs, practically anything you can imagine -- fermented and pickled.  What.  A.  Book.
6. The Oxford Companion to Beer -- Garret Oliver
• Believe it or not, I've read this encyclopedia cover to cover!  As a narrative, it's pretty dry -- I don't recommend reading it cover to cover.  But as an encyclopedia, it's second to none.  Everything you could ever possibly want to know about every corner of the beer world, from styles, to countries, to techniques, to history, and everything in between.
7. Wine -- From Grapes to Glass -- Jens Priewe
• We really enjoy our wine, in the Kirkland household.  This book is a decent "coffee table" book, with beautiful pictures and good information about wine styles, grapes, and regions.  If you want a more authoritative text book, I recommend The Oxford Companion to Wine, by Jancis Robinson.
8. Charred and Scruffed -- Adam Perry Lang
• Before Aaron Franklin's book, this was my only barbeque cookbook.  It's pretty good, especially if your equipment matches the super simple, Charbroil grill with charcoal briquets, in which case, this book will teach you everything you need to know to produce the best barbeque you're going to get out of that equipment.  Seeing as I'm cooking on different hardware these days, though, this book doesn't hold much information that applies to my grills anymore.

And a few from Kim's collection:

1. Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook -- Martha Stewart
2. Salad for Dinner -- Jeanne Kelley
3. One Sheet Eats -- Oxmoor House
4. The New Orleans Cookbook -- Rima and Richard Collin
5. Modern Art Desserts -- Caitlin Freeman
6. From Emeril's Kitchen -- Emeril Lagasse

What are some of your favorites?  I could use some new material!

Cheers,

:-Dustin

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Working from Home: Lessons Learned Over 20 Years & a Shopping List

I've been a full-time, work-from-home employee for the vast majority of the last 20 years, and 100% since 2008.

In this post, I'm going to share a few of the benefits and best practices that I've discovered over the years, and I'll share with you a shopping list of hardware and products that I have come to love or depend on, over the years.

I worked in a variety of different roles -- software engineer, engineering manager, product manager, and executive (CTO, VP Product, Chief Product Officer) -- and with a couple of differet companies, big and small (IBM, Google, Canonical, Gazzang, and Apex).  In fact, I was one of IBM's early work-from-home interns, as a college student in 2000, when my summer internship manager allowed me to continue working when I went back to campus, and I used the ATT Global Network dial-up VPN client to "upload" my code to IBM's servers.

If there's anything positive to be gained out of our recent life changes, I hope that working from home will become much more widely accepted and broadly practiced around the world, in jobs and industries where it's possible.  Moreover, I hope that other jobs and industries will get even more creative and flexible with remote work arrangements, while maintaining work-life-balance, corporate security, and employee productivity.

In many cases, we would all have a healthier workplace, if anyone generally stayed home when they were feeling even just a bit unwell.  Over these next few weeks, I hope that many other people discover the joy, freedom, and productivity working from home provides.  Here are a few things that I've learned over the years, and some of the tools that I've acquired...

Benefits, Costs, and Mitigations

Benefits

• Commute -- If you're like me, you hate sitting in traffic.  Or waiting on a train.  Erase your commute entirely when you work from home.  I love having an extra hour in the morning, to set out my day, and extra time in the evenings with my family.
• Family -- Speaking of family, I'm adding this as a benefit all on its own.  I love being able to put my kids on the bus in the morning, and be home when they get home, and have quality time in the evenings with my spouse and daughters and dogs.  When I have worked in an office, I've often found that I've left for work before anyone else was awake, and I often got home after everyone was in bed.
• Location -- Work-from-home, in most cases, usually means, work-from-anywhere.  While I spend the vast majority of my time actually working from my home office, I've found that I can be nearly as effective working from a hotel, coffee shop, airplane, my in-laws' house, etc.  It takes some of the same skills and disciplines, but once you break free of the corporate desk, you'll find you can get great work done anywhere.
• Productivity -- Your mileage may vary, but I find I'm personally more productive in the comfort of my own home office, which has evolved to meet my needs.  Yes, I love my colleagues and my teams, and yes, I spend plenty of time traveling, on the road meeting them.

Costs and Mitigations

• Work-life-balance -- This one is important, but it's not hard to fix.  Some people find it hard to separate work and home life, when working from home.  Indeed, you could find yourself "always on", and burn out.  Definitely don't do that.  See the best practices below for some suggestions on mitigating this one.
• Space and Equipment -- There's quite literally a dollar cost, in some cases, to having the necessary space and equipment necessary to work from home.  To mitigate this, you should look into any benefits your employer offers on computer equipment, and potentially speak to an accountant about tax deductions for dedicated space and hardware.  My office is a pretty modest 10'x12' (120 sqft), but it helps that I have big windows and a nice view.
• Relationships -- It can seem a little lonely at home, sometimes, where you might miss out on some of the water cooler chatter and social lunches and happy hours.  You do have to work a little harder to forge and maintain some of those remote relationships.  I insist on seeing my team in person a couple of times a year (once a quarter at least, in most cases), and when I do, I try to ensure that we also hang out socially (breakfast, coffee, lunch, dinner, etc.) beyond just work.  It's amazing how far that will carry, into your next few dozen phone calls and teleconferences.
• Kids -- (UPDATED: 2020-03-10) I'm adding this paragraph post publication, based on questions/comments I've received about how to make this work with kids.  I have two daughters (6 and 7 years old now), that were 18 months apart, so there was a while in there where I had two-under-two.  I'm not going to lie -- it was hard.  I'm blessed with a few advantages -- my wife is a stay-at-home-mom, and I have a dedicated room in my house which is my office.  It has a door that locks.  I actually replaced the cheap, contractor-grade hollow door, with a solid wood door, which greatly reduces noise.  When there is a lot of background noise, I switch from speakers-and-computer-mic, to my noise cancelling headset (more details below).  Sometimes, I even move all the way to the master bedroom (behind yet another set of doors).  I make ample use of the mute button (audio and/or video) while in conference meetings.  I also switch from the computer to the phone, and go outside sometimes.  In a couple of the extreme cases, where I really need silence and focus (e.g. job interviews), I'll sit in my car (in my own garage or at a nearby park), and tether my computer through my phone.  I've worked with colleagues who lived in small spaces, turn a corner of their own master bedroom into a office, with a hideaway desk, with a folding bracket and a butcher block.  My kids are now a little older, and sometimes they're just curious about what I'm doing.  If I'm not in a meeting, I try to make 5 minutes for them, and show them what I'm working on.  If I am in a meeting, and it's a 1:1 or time with a friendly colleague, I'll very briefly introduce them, let them say hi, and them move them along.  Part of the changes happening around the work-from-home shift, is that we're all becoming more understanding of stuff like this.

 Best Practices

• Dedicated space -- I find it essential to have just a bit of dedicated space for an office, that you and the family respect as your working space.  My office is about 8' x 12', with lots of natural light (two huge windows, but also shades that I can draw).  It hangs off of the master bedroom, and it has a door that locks.  Not that I have to lock it often, but sometimes, for important meetings, I do, and my family knows that I need a little extra quiet when my office door is locked.
• Set your hours -- It's really easy to get swept away, into unreasonably long working days, when working from home, especially when you enjoy your job, or when things are extra busy, or when you have a boss or colleagues who are depending on you, or a 1000 other reasons.  It's essential to set your working hours, and do you best to get into a consistent rhythm.  I usually put the kids on the bus around 7am, and then either go for a run or play the piano for a bit, and then start my day pretty consistently at 7:30am, and generally try to wrap up by 5:30pm most days.  Of course there are always exceptions, but that's the expectations I usually set for myself and the people around me.
• Get up and move around -- I do try to get up and move around a few times per day.  If I'm on a call that doesn't require a screen, I'll try to take at least one or two of those from my phone and go move around a bit.  Take a walk down the street or in the garden or even just around the house.  I also try to unplug my laptop and work for at least an hour a day somewhere else around the house (as long as no one else is around) -- perhaps the kitchen table or back porch or couch for a bit.  In the time that I spent at Google, I really came to appreciate all of the lovely bonus spaces where anyone can curl up and work from a laptop for a few hours.  I've tried to reproduce that around my house.
• Greenery -- I think I worked from home for probably 4 years before I added the first house plant in my office.  It's so subtle, but wow, what a difference.  In my older age, I'm now a bit of gardner (indoors and outside), and I try to keep at least a dozen or so bonsai trees, succulents, air plants, and other bits of greenery growing in my office.  If you need a little more Feng Shui in your life, check out this book.

Shopping List

• Technology / Equipment
• Computers
• Macbook Pro 13 -- I use a 13" Apple Macbook Pro, assigned by my employer for work.  I never use it for personal purposes like Gmail, etc. at all, which I keep on a separate machine.
• Thinkpad X250 -- I have an older a Thinkpad running Ubuntu on my desk, almost always streaming CNBC on YouTube TV in full screen (muted).  Sometimes I'll flip it over to CNN or a similar news channel.
• Dell T5600 -- I keep a pretty beefy desktop / server workstation running Ubuntu, with a separate keyboard and monitor, for personal mail and browsing.
• Keyboard / Mouse
• Thinkpad USB Keyboard -- I love the Thinkpad keyboard, and this the USB version is a must have, for me.
• Apple Wireless Keyboard and Trackpad and Tray -- I use the wireless Bluetooth keyboard and mouse pad for my work computer.  I find the tray essential, to keep the keyboard and mouse closely associated.
• Monitors
• Samsung 32" 4K UHD -- I use two monitors, one in portrait, one in landscape.  I really like Samsung, and these are the exact models I use: Gaming Monitor (LU32J590UQNXZA) – 60Hz Refresh, Widescreen Computer Monitor, 3840 x 2160p Resolution, 4ms Response, FreeSync, HDMI, Wall Mount.
• Monitor Desk Mount -- And for those monitors, I use this desk mount, which is full motion, rotates, and attaches to my standing desk.
• USB Hub
• I use this dongle to connect my Macbook to the external 4K monitor, wired gigabit ethernet, and power supply.  This simple, single plug certainly helps me quickly and easily grab my laptop and move around the house easily during the day.
• Laptop Stand
• Nulaxy Ergonomic Riser -- I find this laptop stand helps get the camera angle on the top of my Macbook in a much place, and also frees up some space on my desk.  I sometimes take both the laptop and the stand outside with me, if I need to relocate somewhere and take a couple of conference calls.
• Network
• Ubiquiti / Unifi -- I've written here in this blog about the Ubiquiti network gear a few years ago, and I have to say -- I'm still a huge fan!  I have the Unifi Security Gateway, the 24-port switch, a couple of the 8-port switches with PoE. and 3 of the Unifi Pro wireless access points.  While I don't use the Unifi Cloud Key, you might want one.
• Flat Network Cables -- Perhaps only those of you with at least a slight case of OCD will appreciate these, but wow, they definitely help clean things up around here.
• Storage
• Synology -- I generally keep copies of our family photo archive in Google Photos, as well as a backup here at home, as well.  I'm a fan of the Synology DS218, and the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB hard drives.  Really nice, simple interface, and yet feature-rich.
• Printer / Scanner
• HP Officejet -- While I avoid printing as much as possible, sometimes it's just inevitable.  But, also, working-from-home, you'll find that you often need to scan documents.  You'll definitely need something with an automatic document feeder and can scan directly to PDF.  I like the HP Officejet Pro 9015, but you're looking for a less expensive option, the HP Officejet 5255 is a fine printer/scanner too.
• Speakers
• Google Home Max -- I can't stress this enough: I find it extremely important to have high quality, full range speaker, that faithfully reproduces highs and lows.  I really need something much better than laptop speakers or cheap PC speakers.  Personally, I use a Google Home Max, with the Google Assistant microphone muted, and connected over Bluetooth.  I actually like it positioned behind me, believe it or not.  You could just as easily use an Amazon Echo or any other high quality Bluetooth speaker.
• Bang and Olufsen Beoplay A9 -- This speaker is an absolute dream!  I used it in my office for a while, but eventually moved it to the family room where it's used much more for music and entertainment.  Besides sounding absolutely incredible, it's basically a work of art, beautiful to look at, in any room.
• Headphones
• Apple AirPods -- I use AirPods as my traveling headphones, mostly on planes.  I like that they're compact.  The short battery life leaves a lot to be desired, so I actually travel with two sets, and switch back and forth, recharging them in the case when I switch.
• Bang and Olufsen Beoplay H9 -- Overwhelmingly, I use the Bluetooth speaker for my daily slate of teleconferences, meetings, and phone calls.  However, occasionally I need noise cancelling headphones.  The Beoplay H9i are my favorite -- outstanding comfort, excellent noise cancelling, and unbeatable audio quality.
• Bose QuietComfort 35 ii -- These Bose headphones were my standards for years, until I gave them to my wife, and she fell in love with them.  They're hers now.  Having used both, I prefer the B&O, while she prefers the Bose.  
• Wired headset with mic -- If you prefer a wired headset with a microphone, this gaming headset is a fantastic, inexpensive option.  Note that there's no noise cancellation, but they're quite comfortable and the audio quality is fine.
• Webcam
• Truth be told, at this point, I just use the web cam built into my Macbook.  The quality is much higher than that of my Thinkpad.  I like where it's mounted (top of the laptop screen).  While I connect the laptop to one of the external 4K monitors, I always use the 13" laptop screen as my dedicated screen for Zoom meetings.  I like that the built-in one just works.
• Logitech -- All that said, I have used Logitech C920 webcams for years, and they're great, if you really want or need an external camera connected over USB.
• Microphone
• Like the Webcam, these days I'm just using the built-in mic on the Macbook.  I've tested a couple of different mics with recordings, and while the external ones do sound a little better, the difference is pretty subtle, and not worth the extra pain to connect 
• Blue Snowball -- Again, all that said, I do have, and occasionally use, a Blue Snowball condenser mic.  While subtle, it is definitely an upgrade over the laptop built-in microphone.
• Phone
• For many years working from home, I did have a wired home phone system.  I use Ooma and a Polycom Voicestation.  But about two years ago, I got rid of it all and deliberately moved to using Google Hangouts and Zoom for pretty much everything, and just using my cell phone (Pixel 3) for the rest.
• Furniture / Appliances
• Standing desk
• Uplift (72"x30") -- While I don't always stand, I have become a believer in the standing desk!  I change my position a couple of times per day, going from standing to sitting, and vice versa.  I'm extremely happy with my Uplift Desk, which is based here in Austin, Texas.
• Apex -- I don't have direct experience with this desk, but this was the one I was looking at, and seems quite similar to the Uplift desk that I ended up getting.
• Desk mat
• Aothia Cork and Leather -- I really love desk mats.  They're so nice to write on.  These add a splash of color, and protect the desk from the inevitable coffee spill.  I have a couple of these, and they're great!
• Coffee machine
• Nespresso -- Yes, I have a coffee machine in my office.  It's essential on those days when you're back-to-back packed with meetings.  While I love making a nice pot of coffee down in the kitchen, sometimes I just need to push a button and have a good-enough shot of espresso.  And that's what I get with this machine and these pods (I recently switched from the more expensive authentic Nespresso pods, and can't really tell the difference).
• Coffee Mug
• Ember -- I received an Ember coffee mug as a gift, and I've really come to appreciate this thing.  I don't think I would have bought it for myself on my own, but as a gift, it's great.  Sleek looking and rechargeable, it'll keep your coffee hot down to your last sip.
• Water cooler
• Primo -- And yes, I have a water cooler in my office.  This has really helped me drink more water during the day.  It's nice to have both chilled water, as well as hot water for tea, on demand.
• White board
• Frosted Glass Magnetic Dry Erase -- I have two huge frosted glass dry erase boards, which I use every single day.  And these Amazon Basics markers are good quality too.
• Chair
• I have 15-year-old, high back, faux leather (vinyl) chair that's "good enough", but I certainly lust over the Herman Miller Aeron chair and the add-on headrest.  Maybe one day.
• Light / Fan
• Haiku L -- My office is extremely well lit, with two huge windows.  Overhead, I used to have a single, nasty canned light, which I replaced with this Haiku L ceiling fan and light, and it's just brilliant, with a dimmer, and voice controls.
• Air purifier
• HEPA Filter -- Some years ago, I added an air purifier to my office, mainly to handle the pet dander (two big dogs and a cat) that used to room my office.  It's subtle, but generally something I'm glad to have pulling dust and germs out of the air.

Now I'm curious...  What did I miss?  What does your home office look like?  What are you favorite gadgets and appliances?

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Cheers,
:-Dustin

KubeCon Interviews

Of all the work I performed at Google, perhaps my favorite was a volunteer project, working with the Google social media marketing team, and the video production crew, conducting interviews at a few conferences. Here are a few that I could find...

KubeCon Barcelona Interviews, May 2019

• Interview with Lukasz Heinrich
• Interview with Ricardo Rocha
• Interview with Michelle Casbon
• Interview with Tim Hockin
• Interview with Maya Kaczorowski

KubeCon Seattle Interviews, December 2018

• Interviewed by Saad Ali

KubeCon Copenhagen Interviews, May 2018

• Interview with Tim Hockin
• Interview with Lakshmi Sharma
• Interview with Sebastien Goasguen
• Interview with Ihor Dvoretskyi
• Interview with Matt Rickard
• Interview with David Oppenheimer
• Interview with Jeremy Lewi
• Interview with David Aronchick
• Interview with Andrew Jackson and Josh Hoak
• Interview with Jan Tattermusch
• Interview with Dan Ciruli
• Interview with Maya Kaczorowski
• Interview with JD Velasquez
• Interview with Saad Ali
• Interview with Ian Lewis
• Interview with Yoshi Tamura

Cheers,

Dustin

Dustin Kirkland, Google | CUBEConversation

Deloitte OnCloud Podcast -- Live from GCN 2019: Google's take on hybrid and multi-cloud models

I joined Anuj and Eric in Deloitte's OnCloud podcast, live from the expo floor at Google Cloud Next '19 San Francisco, to discuss hybrid and multi-cloud with Google Anthos.

You can stream it here.

Google Cloud Next '19 San Francisco: Multi-Cloud Kubernetes -- Formulas for Success

Google Cloud Next '18 London: GKE On-Prem: Hybrid Cloud Solutions for Enterprise IT

Google Cloud Next '18 Tokyo: D1-6-S08_GKE On-Prem Kubernetes を利用した企業 IT のためのハイブリッドクラウド ソリューション-auto

Software Defined Interviews Episode 73: Dustin Kirkland on Linux, Cloud Computing and Product Management

I joined Brandon Whichard on his Software Defined podcast, to discuss Linux, Cloud Computing and making wine. I talked about my career journey from entry-level developer to Google Product Manager. He shares his experience working at IBM, Canonical and now Google. Plus, he tells the story of how working on his own open source project helped him land a job at startup.

Google Cloud Next '18 San Francisco: GKE On-Prem - Managing Across Hybrid IT Environments with Open Architectures

I'm Joining the Google Cloud Team!

A couple of months ago, I reflected on "10 Amazing Years of Ubuntu and Canonical".  Indeed, it has been one hell of a ride, and that post is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg...

The people I've met, the things I've learned, the places I've been, the users I've helped, the partners I've enabled, the customers I've served -- these are undoubtedly the most amazing and cherished experiences of my professional career to date.

And for the first time in my life, I can fully and completely grok the Ubuntu philosophy:

I am who I am, because of who we all are

With all my heart, I love what we've created in Ubuntu, I love the products that we've built at Canonical, I love each and every person involved.

So, it is with mixed emotion that the Canonical chapter of my life comes to a close and a new one begins...

Next week, I have the honor and privilege to join the Google Cloud product management team, and work beside so, so, so, so many people who continue to inspire me.

Words fail to express how excited I am about this opportunity!  In this new role, I will be working closely with Aparna Sinha, Michael Rubin, and Tim Hockin, and I hope to see many of you at KubeCon Europe in Copenhagen later this month.

My friends and family will be happy to know that we're staying here in Austin, and I'll be working from the Google Austin office with my new team, largely based in Sunnyvale, California.

The Ubuntu community can expect to see me remaining active in the Ubuntu developer community as a Core Dev and a MOTU, and I will continue to maintain many of the dozens of open source projects and packages that so many of you have come to rely upon.  Perhaps I'll even become more active upstream in Debian, if the Debian community will have me there too :-)

Finally, an enormous THANK YOU to everyone who has made this journey through Ubuntu and Canonical such a warm, rewarding, emotional, exceptional experience!

Cheers,
@DustinKirkland

RFC: The New Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Server Installer

One of the many excellent suggestions from last year's HackerNews thread, Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?, was to refresh the Ubuntu server's command line installer:

We're pleased to introduce this new installer, which will be the default Server installer for 18.04 LTS, and solicit your feedback.

Follow the instructions below, to download the current daily image, and install it into a KVM.  Alternatively, you could write it to a flash drive and install a physical machine, or try it in your virtual machine of your choice (VMware, VirtualBox, etc.).

$ wget http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-server/daily-live/current/bionic-live-server-amd64.iso
$ qemu-img create -f raw target.img 10G
$ kvm -m 1024 -boot d -cdrom bionic-live-server-amd64.iso -hda target.img
...
$ kvm -m 1024 target.img

For those too busy to try it themselves at the moment, I've taken a series of screenshots below, for your review.

Finally, you can provide feedback, bugs, patches, and feature requests against the Subiquity project in Launchpad:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/subiquity

Cheers,
Dustin

10 Amazing Years of Ubuntu and Canonical

February 2008, Canonical's office in Lexington, MA

10 years ago today, I joined Canonical, on the very earliest version of the Ubuntu Server Team!

And in the decade since, I've had the tremendous privilege to work with so many amazing people, and the opportunity to contribute so much open source software to the Ubuntu ecosystem.

Marking the occasion, I've reflected about much of my work over that time period and thought I'd put down in writing a few of the things I'm most proud of (in chronological order)...  Maybe one day, my daughters will read this and think their daddy was a real geek :-)

1. update-motd / motd.ubuntu.com (September 2008)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/09/update-motd-in-ubuntu-intrepid.html

Throughout the history of UNIX, the "message of the day" was always manually edited and updated by the local system administrator.  Until Ubuntu's message-of-the-day.  In fact, I received an email from Dennis Ritchie and Jon "maddog" Hall, confirming this, in April 2010.  This started as a feature request for the Landscape team, but has turned out to be tremendously useful and informative to all Ubuntu users.  Just last year, we launched motd.ubuntu.com, which provides even more dynamic information about important security vulnerabilities and general news from the Ubuntu ecosystem.  Mathias Gug help me with the design and publication.

2. manpages.ubuntu.com (September 2008)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2008/09/announcing-ubuntu-manpage-repository.html

This was the first public open source project I worked on, in my spare time at Canonical.  I had a local copy of the Ubuntu archive and I was thinking about what sorts of automated jobs I could run on it.  So I wrote some scripts that extracted the manpages out of each one, formatted them as HTML, and published into a structured set of web directories.  10 years later, it's still up and running, serving thousands of hits per day.  In fact, this was one of the ways we were able to shrink the Ubuntu minimal image, but removing the manpages, since they're readable online.  Colin Watson and Kees Cook helped me with the initial implementation, and Matthew Nuzum helped with the CSS and Ubuntu theme in the HTML.

3. Byobu (December 2008)

If you know me at all, you know my passion for the command line UI/UX that is "Byobu".  Byobu was born as the "screen-profiles" project, over lunch at Google in Mountain View, in December of 2008, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.  Around the lunch table, several of us (including Nick Barcet, Dave Walker, Michael Halcrow, and others), shared our tips and tricks from our own ~/.screenrc configuration files.  In Cape Town, February 2010, at the suggestion of Gustavo Niemeyer, I ported Byobu from Screen to Tmux.  Since Ubuntu Servers don't generally have GUIs, Byobu is designed to be a really nice interface to the Ubuntu command line environment.

4. eCryptfs / Ubuntu Encrypted Home Directories (October 2009)

• http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7568/

I was familiar with eCryptfs from its inception in 2005, in the IBM Linux Technology Center's Security Team, sitting next to Michael Halcrow who was the original author.  When I moved to Canonical, I helped Michael maintain the userspace portion of eCryptfs (ecryptfs-utils) and I shepherded into Ubuntu.  eCryptfs was super powerful, with hundreds of options and supported configurations, but all of that proved far to difficult for users at large.  So I set out to simplify it drastically, with an opinionated set of basic defaults.  I started with a simple command to mount a "Private" directory inside of your home directory, where you could stash your secrets.  A few months later, on a long flight to Paris, I managed to hack a new PAM module, pam_ecryptfs.c, that actually encrypted your entire home directory!  This was pretty revolutionary at the time -- predating Apple's FileVault or Microsoft's Bitlocker, even.  Today, tens of millions of Ubuntu users have used eCryptfs to secure their personal data.  I worked closely with Tyler Hicks, Kees Cook, Jamie Strandboge, Michael Halcrow, Colin Watson, and Martin Pitt on this project over the years.

5. ssh-import-id (March 2010)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2010/03/introducing-ssh-import-lp-id.html

With the explosion of virtual machines and cloud instances in 2009 / 2010, I found myself constantly copying public SSH keys around.  Moreover, given Canonical's globally distributed nature, I also regularly found myself asking someone for their public SSH keys, so that I could give them access to an instance, perhaps for some pair programming or assistance debugging.  As it turns out, everyone I worked with, had a Launchpad.net account, and had their public SSH keys available there.  So I created (at first) a simple shell script to securely fetch and install those keys.  Scott Moser helped clean up that earliest implementation.  Eventually, I met Casey Marshall, who helped rewrite it entirely in Python.  Moreover, we contacted the maintainers of Github, and asked them to expose user public SSH keys by the API -- which they did!  Now, ssh-import-id is integrated directly into Ubuntu's new subiquity installer and used by many other tools, such as cloud-init and MAAS.

6. Orchestra / MAAS (August 2011)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2011/08/formal-introduction-to-ubuntu-orchestra.html

In 2009, Canonical purchased 5 Dell laptops, which was the Ubuntu Server team's first "cloud".  These laptops were our very first lab for deploying and testing Eucalyptus clouds.  I was responsible for those machines at my house for a while, and I automated their installation with PXE, TFTP, DHCP, DNS, and a ton of nasty debian-installer preseed data.  That said -- it worked!  As it turned out, Scott Moser and Mathias Gug had both created similar setups at their houses for the same reason.  I was mentoring a new hire at Canonical, named Andres Rodriquez at the time, and he took over our part-time hacks and we worked together to create the Orchestra project.  Orchestra, itself was short lived.  It was severely limited by Cobbler as a foundation technology.  So the Orchestra project was killed by Canonical.  But, six months later, a new project was created, based on the same general concept -- physical machine provisioning at scale -- with an entire squad of engineers led by...Andres Rodriguez :-)  MAAS today is easily one of the most important projects the Ubuntu ecosystem and one of the most successful products in Canonical's portfolio.

7. pollinate / pollen / entropy.ubuntu.com (February 2014)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/02/random-seeds-in-ubuntu-1404-lts-cloud.html

In 2013, I set out to secure Ubuntu at large from a set of attacks ranging from insufficient entropy at first boot.  This was especially problematic in virtual machine instances, in public clouds, where every instance is, by design, exactly identical to many others.  Moreover, the first thing that instance does, is usually ... generate SSH keys.  This isn't hypothetical -- it's quite real.  Raspberry Pi's running Debian were deemed susceptible to this exact problem in November 2015.  So designed and implemented a client (shell script that runs at boot, and fetches some entropy from one to many sources), as well as a high-performance server (golang).  The client is the 'pollinate' script, which runs on the first boot of every Ubuntu server, and the server is the cluster of physical machines processing hundreds of requests per minute at entropy.ubuntu.com.  Many people helped review the design and implementation, including Kees Cook, Jamie Strandboge, Seth Arnold, Tyler Hicks, James Troup, Scott Moser, Steve Langasek, Gustavo Niemeyer, and others.

8. The Orange Box (May 2014)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/05/the-orange-box-cloud-for-free-man.html

In December of 2011, in my regular 1:1 with my manager, Mark Shuttleworth, I told him about these new "Intel NUCs", which I had bought and placed them around my house.  I had 3, each of which was running Ubuntu, and attached to a TV around the house, as a media player (music, videos, pictures, etc).  In their spare time, though, they were OpenStack Nova nodes, capable of running a couple of virtual machines.  Mark immediately asked, "How many of those could you fit into a suitcase?"  Within 24 hours, Mark had reached out to the good folks at TranquilPC and introduced me to my new mission -- designing the Orange Box.  I worked with the Tranquil folks through Christmas, and we took our first delivery of 5 of these boxes in January of 2014.  Each chassis held 10 little Intel NUC servers, and a switch, as well as a few peripherals.  Effectively, it's a small data center that travels.  We spend the next 4 months working on the hardware under wraps and then unveiled them at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta in May 2014.  We've gone through a couple of iterations on the hardware and software over the last 4 years, and these machines continue to deliver tremendous value, from live demos on the booth, to customer workshops on premises, or simply accelerating our own developer productivity by "shipping them a lab in a suitcase".  I worked extensively with Dan Poler on this project, over the course of a couple of years.

9. Hollywood (December 2014)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/12/hollywood-technodrama.html

Perhaps the highlight of my professional career came in October of 2016.  Watching Saturday Night Live with my wife Kim, we were laughing at a skit that poked fun at another of my favorite shows, Mr. Robot.  On the computer screen behind the main character, I clearly spotted Hollywood!  Hollywood is just a silly, fun little project I created on a plane one day, mostly to amuse Kim.  But now, it's been used in Saturday Night Live, NBC Dateline News, and an Experian TV commercials!  Even Jess Frazelle created a Docker container. 

10. petname / golang-petname / python-petname (January 2015)

• http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2015/01/introducing-petname-libraries-for.html

From "warty warthog" to "bionic beaver", we've always had a focus on fun, and user experience here in Ubuntu.  How hard is it to talk to your colleague about your Amazon EC2 instance, "i-83ab39f93e"?  Or your container "adfxkenw"?  We set out to make something a little more user-friendly with our "petnames".  Petnames are randomly generated "adjective-animal" names, which are easy to pronounce, spell, and remember.  I curated and created libraries that are easily usable in Shell, Golang, and Python.  With the help of colleagues like Stephane Graber and Andres Rodriguez, we now use these in many places in the Ubuntu ecosystem, such as LXD and MAAS.

If you've read this post, thank you for indulging me in a nostalgic little trip down memory lane!  I've had an amazing time designing, implementing, creating, and innovating with some of the most amazing people in the entire technology industry.  And here's to a productive, fun future!

Cheers,

:-Dustin

RFC: Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Minimal Images

• To date, we've shaved the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal images down by over 53%, since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and trimmed nearly 100 packages and thousands of files.
• Feedback welcome here: https://ubu.one/imgSurvey

In last year's AskHN HackerNews post, "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?", and the subsequent treatment of the data, we noticed a recurring request for "lighter, smaller, more minimal" Ubuntu images.

This is particularly useful for container images (Docker, LXD, Kubernetes, etc.), embedded device environments, and anywhere a developer wants to bootstrap an Ubuntu system from the smallest possible starting point.  Smaller images generally:

• are subject to fewer security vulnerabilities and subsequent updates
• reduce overall network bandwidth consumption
• and require less on disk storage

First, a definition...

"The Ubuntu Minimal Image is the smallest base upon which a user can apt install any package in the Ubuntu archive."

By design, Ubuntu Minimal Images specifically lack the creature comforts, user interfaces and user design experience that have come to define the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Cloud images.

To date, we've shaved the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal images down by over 53%, since Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and trimmed nearly 100 packages and thousands of files.

-->

Release	Bytes (compressed)	Bytes (uncompressed)	Files	Directories	Links	Packages
	ls -alF	du -sb .	find . -type f | wc -l	find . -type d | wc -l	find . -type l | wc -l	sudo chroot . dpkg -l | grep -c ^i
14.04 LTS base	65,828,262	188,406,508	9,953	1,306	1,496	189
16.04 LTS base	48,296,930	120,370,143	5,655	751	1,531	103
18.04 LTS base	31,089,259	81,270,020	2,589	596	190	95

As of today, the Bionic (18.04 LTS) minimal image weighs in at 30MB (compressed), and 81MB (uncompressed on disk), and is comprised of 100 Debian packages.

We've removed things like locales and languages, which are easy to add back, but are less necessary in scale-out, container working environments.  We've also removed other human-focused resources, like documentation, manpages, and changelogs, which are more easily read online (and also easy to re-enable).  This base filesystem tarball also lacks a kernel and an init system, as it's intended to be used inside of a chroot or application container.  Note that Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel team has also made tremendous strides tuning and minimizing Linux into various optimized kernel flavors.

We've just released Bionic's Alpha 2, in our development cycle toward an April 26, 2018 release date of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS -- our 7th Ubuntu LTS.

At this point, we're soliciting your feedback in this public "RFC" on our progress toward the smallest Ubuntu base image ever!

Here are a few resources:

• Download the image:
• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-base/daily/current/
• Review the package manifest:
• http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-base/daily/current/bionic-base-amd64.manifest
• Review the file and directory structure:
• https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/26506363/
• Launch a minimal Docker image:
• $ docker run -it ubuntu:bionic

I can still see another 1.2MB of savings to harvest in /usr/share/doc, /usr/share/info, and /usr/share/man, and the Foundations team is already looking into filtering out that documentation, too.

Do you see any other opportunities for savings?  Can you help us crop the Bionic (18.04 LTS) images any further?  Is there something that we've culled, that you see as problematic?  We're interested in your feedback at the form here:

• https://ubu.one/imgSurvey

Cheers,

Dustin

Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu -- The Ultimate Developer Laptop of 2018!

I'm the proud owner of a new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition (9360) laptop, pre-loaded from the Dell factory with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop.

Kudos to the Dell and the Canonical teams that have engineered a truly remarkable developer desktop experience.  You should also check out the post from Dell's senior architect behind the XPS 13, Barton George.

As it happens, I'm also the proud owner of a long loved, heavily used, 1st Generation Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop :-)  See this post from May 7, 2012.  You'll be happy to know that machine is still going strong.  It's now my wife's daily driver.  And I use it almost every day, for any and all hacking that I do from the couch, after hours, after I leave the office ;-)

Now, this latest XPS edition is a real dream of a machine!

From a hardware perspective, this newer XPS 13 sports an Intel i7-7660U 2.5GHz processor and 16GB of memory.  While that's mildly exciting to me (as I've long used i7's and 16GB), here's what I am excited about...

The 500GB NVME storage and a whopping 1239 MB/sec I/O throughput!

kirkland@xps13:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/nvme0n1
/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing cached reads:   25230 MB in  2.00 seconds = 12627.16 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 3718 MB in  3.00 seconds = 1239.08 MB/sec

And on top of that, this is my first QHD+ touch screen laptop display, sporting a magnificent 3200x1800 resolution.  The graphics are nothing short of spectacular.  Here's nearly 4K of Hollywood hard "at work" :-)

The keyboard is super comfortable.  I like it a bit better than the 1st generation.  Unlike your Apple friends, we still have our F-keys, which is important to me as a Byobu user :-)  The placement of the PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End keys (as Fn + Up/Down/Left/Right) takes a while to get used to.

The speakers are decent for a laptop, and the microphone is excellent.  The webcam is placed in an odd location (lower left of the screen), but it has quite nice resolution and focus quality.

And Bluetooth and WiFi, well, they "just work".  I got 98.2 Mbits/sec of throughput over WiFi.

kirkland@xps:~$ iperf -c 10.0.0.45
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.0.0.45, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.0.0.149 port 40568 connected with 10.0.0.45 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0-10.1 sec   118 MBytes  98.2 Mbits/sec

There's no external display port, so you'll need something like this USB-C-to-HDMI adapter to project to a TV or monitor.

There's 1x USB-C port, 2x USB-3 ports, and an SD-Card reader.

One of the USB-3 ports can be used to charge your phone or other devices, even while your laptop is suspended.  I use this all the time, to keep my phone topped up while I'm aboard planes, trains, and cars.  To do so, you'll need to enable "USB PowerShare" in the BIOS.  Here's an article from Dell's KnowledgeBase explaining how.

Honestly, I have only one complaint...  And that's that there is no Trackstick mouse (which is available on some Dell models).  I'm not a huge fan of the Touchpad.  It's too sensitive, and my palms are always touching it inadvertently.  So I need to use an external mouse to be effective.  I'll continue to provide this feedback to the Dell team, in the hopes that one day I'll have my perfect developer laptop!  Otherwise, this machine is a beauty.  I'm sure you'll love it too.

Cheers,
Dustin