Col

December days: Being a working parent

2014-12-29T23:40:36Z

ghoti asked me to talk about being a working parent, having initially misread a "being an incoming parent" prompt from a previous day. Due to my particular circumstances, some of this overlaps with a previous prompt, "working from home", but there's probably a bit more I can write about independently.

I tend not to use the phrase "working parent" to describe myself, since any time I try to do ghoti's full-time-parenting job for more than an hour or two I'm reminded of just how much work it is to do it well! (Although today I got both little children to sleep earlier than usual and without an epic tantrum, so am feeling flush with success, at least until it next goes wrong.) I do sometimes feel that the business of earning money is the easy job in relative terms, and it's all too easy to hide in my study when the children are being particularly difficult. I've been trying to do better at avoiding that.

In practical terms, of course, it means I'm not routinely able to do very much with the children during the week, and if we go away for the weekend I normally have to be back in time to work on Monday. More insidiously, if I've been having a stressful time at work then it's very hard to find much energy to play with the children; unfortunately I don't find that one activity helps me recharge for the other, rather the opposite. So I'm very much hoping that my new job in the new year will leave me with more energy for the evenings and weekends.

On the other hand, my job does pay well enough that the children don't lack much (except space, but we're working on that more gradually), and hopefully that will continue. As the primary earner I do feel a pretty strong responsibility to turn my skillset into a comfortable lifestyle for them.

I may have missed some part of this question, so please do say in comments if this is too narrow an answer and I'll try to expand on it.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

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December days: Working from home

2014-12-10T17:36:26Z

emperor asked me to say something about working from home.

My first two proper jobs (Zeus then nCipher) were in conventional offices. I was never exactly the nine-to-five type, but only because mornings are hard and I usually sloped in somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 and left about eight hours later. I always got a lot socially out of working in offices; I'm still in contact with friends I met at Zeus, and nCipher had the bridge-playing cabal as well as several SGO-type usual suspects. So when I went to work for Canonical it was quite a strange thing to be working at home all day. To start with we were of course a startup and were trying to get a product sorted out at all costs, so while I did try to keep vaguely reasonable hours I had largely unavoidable silly things like the 32 hours awake just before our preview release (followed by 16 hours of sleep), and basically got off to a bad start in terms of setting good work/life balance habits.

The social aspects have mostly been trade-offs. On the one hand, I really appreciate being able to concentrate without significant interruptions; certain kinds of programming activity require me to hold quite a bit of complicated and easily-disrupted state in my head. It's really noticeable now when I go and work in an office for a week that I feel I'm forever being interrupted about things that people could just as well have e-mailed me about, and I generally feel I don't get very much done. On the other hand, I do sometimes feel quite isolated and need to explicitly schedule time to go out and chat with a wider variety of people; I'm usually quite introverted, so I need to recharge after a while around lots of people, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy seeing them. Being able to spend time with my family as they grow up has been great, and I'd have missed an awful lot if I'd had a job with similar requirements in an office. At the same time, it's really difficult to keep a mental separation between work and not-work, particularly because my hobbies include Debian development which involves sitting in the same place doing something that is at least in the same general category and often overlaps directly. Over the years I've found it far too easy to slip into the habit of not really ever quite finishing up at work, or of hiding in my study any time I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, and these are problems I very badly need to fix.

On the whole I think I would find it difficult to go back to working in an office nowadays. I've been working from home for over two-thirds of my post-university life, and readjusting back would be very hard in different ways. But I'm intending and hoping that the reset switch afforded by my change of rôle will give me a chance to set new and more functional habits without having to switch modes entirely.

If you're considering working from home, then I would say a few things. Certainly don't discard it out of hand, because it does work well for a lot of people, and even though I've had a number of problems it hasn't been one-sided either. If you're the sort of person who gets distracted very easily and needs to be surrounded by people in order to keep on the job, then it may not be for you; I've seen people who are very much at the other end of the scale from me and who just found themselves entirely unable to keep themselves motivated from home. It will probably help if you get some experience with a job that's a known quantity, rather than trying to switch jobs and modes at the same time. And take work/life balance seriously, even if you don't notice the problems at first, because otherwise you'll regret not paying attention earlier.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

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December days: Ubuntu

2014-12-07T22:35:43Z

jack asked me about Ubuntu.

My direct involvement with what would become Ubuntu started in sunny Málaga, back in February 2004. I'd gone there for a free software conference, partly to talk about Debian release management (which I was heavily involved in back then) and partly to spend some time with a few other like-minded developers who were concerned about the state of dpkg maintenance and wanted to talk about plans for improving it. While I was there - if memory serves, in a lecture theatre listening to one of my first experiences of the marvel that is simultaneous translation - this e-mail popped up:

From: Mark Shuttleworth
To: Colin Watson
Subject: New Debian-related project

Hi Colin

We haven't met, but I've appreciated the contribution you make to
Debian. I'm starting a new project that I hope will be very positive for
Debian, and wondered if you would like to discuss it by telephone. It
will be open source, build on Debian and contribute much work back to
Debian itself.

I'm based in London, so we are in the same timezone which should make it
easier to find a good time to speak if you are interested. Let me have a
phone number and a time to call, and I'll give you a ring.

Cheers,
Mark

Well then, that's interesting. Non-spammy enough that I didn't delete it out of hand (although I heard later that some people who received similar messages did!), but at the time I was a year or so into working at nCipher and rather enjoying it, so I didn't feel a particularly urgent need to follow it up. A few days later the then Debian Project Leader (who happened to be a friend of mine) got in touch and said, hey, this guy is for real, you should probably reply and see what he wants. OK, so I replied and we arranged a phone call, which is perhaps the oddest job interview I've ever had, really more of a pitch but definitely one I thought was very promising indeed, and at the end Mark asked what I was earning at the moment and named a rather bigger number. I mean, I was interested already but that kind of grabs one's attention. I was still a bit hesitant because I'd only been at nCipher a year and didn't want to look like I was job-hopping, but I went and talked it over with ghoti (we'd been going out for a few months) and eventually decided that this was something I'd kick myself for turning down.

So, I went to a meeting in April, and then started in mid-May. I have a later "December days" post scheduled about working from home, but it was certainly very odd for a while. Fortunately I was already used to talking with Debian folks using IRC and e-mail, so it wasn't a horrible culture shock. At that point there was no Ubuntu and certainly no Canonical; there was a holding company called Fieldwave, and my first contract was with them. Everything was "under the radar" in startup terminology, and there was a really fun kind of subversive feel to the operation right at first.

I was initially supposed to be working on the bug tracking system, which made sense because at the time I was maintaining Debian's BTS. I was also a Debian installer hacker by that point, though, and so a short time into my new job the release manager got in touch with me and said something along the lines of "hi Colin, do you think you could quickly put together some installable CD images for us?" Right. That took centre stage and my work on the bug tracking system never really happened - I just sort of unofficially moved sideways into working on the distribution itself, which is the sort of thing that tends to happen anyway when you have a handful of people all scrabbling to do whatever needs to be done. Putting together images ended up involving a mix of installer hacking, fixing up other bits of the system that happened to cause problems, and doing general release management kind of work to make sure everything stayed consistent, which are all things I turn out to be good at but ended up putting me right in the middle of Ubuntu development; for the first year, I handled the mechanics of every single release we ever did (including development milestones), wrote a good deal of software to that end, and tested most of the images along the way, and it wasn't until there was a milestone release while I was very thoroughly out of contact on honeymoon that other people had to start learning how to handle releases.

Of course over ten years I've done a lot of different things, including a distinctly ill-conceived stint in management (no, really, past Colin, this is not something you're good at and you'll hurt yourself trying, just don't); I've worked in project governance and I've been the Ubuntu release manager; but most of my work can be traced back in some way to working on the installer. I really love the fundamental nature of that work, particularly with the approach that d-i takes: you start with a bare kernel and some absolutely minimal tools, and gradually bootstrap your way up to a fully-functional system. For some years, each time we started a new release cycle, something different went wrong that meant that I had to go back and figure out how to make that bootstrapping process work properly again, and it was always a tremendously enjoyable exercise. Later on I started doing boot loader work, notably on GRUB, which is kind of the same thing only more so.

As for what we've produced: I've seen it go from the underdog everyone loved, Debian but with more predictable releases and better support, through to being top of the Linux desktop market and then being a source of controversy as it started making lots of extensive user interface changes with Unity and so forth, to the situation today where we're a major force in cloud installations and trying to make headway on phones. For the most part I've worked in lower parts of the stack - I used to say only somewhat jokingly that my job ended once graphics came up - and so I haven't really been directly involved in very many of the things that have upset people, and I've always been able to stay quite closely connected to Debian development.

I don't like everything we've done, and really it would be surprising if I did. But, ten years ago, Linux was a thing that geeks used but it was really quite difficult to give it to people whose main focus wasn't the computer itself. We weren't the only ones working on that by any means, but Ubuntu put a lot of effort into fixing that and doing really good integration, and the difference between then and now is like night and day. I'm very proud of what we've managed to do. It will be interesting to watch how it continues from a slightly greater remove as of next year.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

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Job opening

2014-11-14T15:45:13Z

My team has a few openings, partly but not exclusively as a result of me moving on (public, f'locked). There's a lot of interesting stuff going on, it's been good to me for many years, and I can assure you that somebody starting from scratch won't have the same problems with ten years of accreted responsibilities that I did!

If the job description interests you, give me a shout and I'd be happy to talk with you about it.

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