292: Cheese on the SCaLE

A new voice joins the show, and we share stories from our recent adventures at SCaLE 17x.

Plus we look at the Debian project's recent struggles, NGINX's sale, and Mozilla's new service.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.

Links:

• On 30th anniversary of web, Amazon shares first homepage, Google keeps doodling and more – GeekWire
• The Web Foundation on Twitter — In 1989, @timberners_lee submitted a proposal that would change the world. To celebrate #Web30, for the next 30 hours we're asking everyone to contribute to a crowdsourced timeline of web milestones.
• Introducing Firefox Send, Providing Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private - The Mozilla Blog — Send makes it easy for your recipient, too. No hoops to jump through. They simply receive a link to click and download the file. They don’t need to have a Firefox account to access your file.
• F5 Acquires NGINX to Bridge NetOps & DevOps, Providing Customers with Consistent Application Services Across Every Environment - NGINX — F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities.
• NGINX to Join F5: Proud to Finish One Chapter and Excited to Start the Next
• Announcing the release of sway 1.0 | Drew DeVault’s Blog — 1,315 days after I started the sway project, it’s finally time for sway 1.0! I had no idea at the time how much work I was in for, or how many talented people would join and support the project with me. In order to complete this project, we have had to rewrite the entire Linux desktop nearly from scratch. Nearly 300 people worked together, together writing over 9,000 commits and almost 100,000 lines of code, to bring you this release.
• xyproto/wallutils: Utilities for handling monitors, resolutions, wallpapers and timed wallpapers — Detect monitor resolutions and set the desktop wallpaper, for any window manager.
• Winding down my Debian involvement — When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have these days. The following sections each deal with what I consider a major pain point, in no particular order. Some of them influence each other—for example, if changes worked better, we could have a chance at transitioning packages to be more easily machine readable.
• A (Partial) Defense of Debian | The Changelog — I was sad to read on his blog that Michael Stapelberg is winding down his Debian involvement. In his post, he outlined some critiques of Debian. In his post, I want to acknowledge that he is on point with some of them, but also push back on others.
• Leaderless Debian - LWN.net — One of the traditional rites of the (northern hemisphere) spring is the election for the Debian project leader. Over a six-week period, interested candidates put their names forward, describe their vision for the project as a whole, answer questions from Debian developers, then wait and watch while the votes come in. But what would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
• Chris Fisher on Twitter — Went hands on with @Azure Spehere dev kits. I would not be surprised if @linuxacademyCOM students start asking for courses in this stuff. They keep the #Linux based OS up to date for 10 years, no subscription.
• System76 on Twitter — Jupiter Broadcasting meetup photo! It’s always a guaranteed great time with @ChrisLAS and @jupitersignal!
• Why snaps? - Popey’s talk at SCaLE 17x
• Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup Page
• Trying out software? - Feedback from Ken — I'm intrigued by and curious about much of the software you mention regularly. I'm tempted to try some of it, but I don't have a good sense of how easy it is to delete or clean off installed programs in a way that ensures a stable system without a lot of left over junk. Can you give some insight about how you usually handle this. I'd rather not have to nuke-and-pave the OS over and over to insure a stable system.
• Home automation tips from Paul — I have only recently started to use node-red on my ubuntu box at home. Connected it easily to Alexa and also my Broadlink IR/RF blaster. But I am hardly scraping the surface.