New job

As some of you might already be aware, in November I joined Intel's Open Source Technology Centre (OTC) to work on the Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation project that aims to bring together embedded Linux developers from across the industry. More specifically I am working on Poky, Yocto's build system, which was originally based on OpenEmbedded and has always maintained a high level of compatibility. I've worked with OE for a number of years and working on Poky is really not much different, although I've had the opportunity to dig a little deeper into BitBake and Poky/OE's internals, gaining a greater understanding of how the system works (and of course being able to contribute a number of fixes.) Lately I have also had a chance to test out Poky-built systems on some real hardware, including an eMenlow box and a RouterStation Pro board (usually my runtime testing and debugging is done within QEMU.)

The recent agreement on collaboration between the Yocto Project and OE has been a great thing to witness. At the moment Yocto is closing in on its 1.0 release which is shaping up to be a good one; meanwhile over the last month work has begun in earnest on openembedded-core, the common base for both projects going forward. I've submitted a few patches to oe-core already and when 1.0 is out the door I am keen to get stuck in on further improvements there.

I must say, it's exciting to not only be working with open source / free software technologies on a daily basis, but as a former proprietary software developer for many years, it is also a great privilege to be working on open source projects full time, and to be working alongside some very smart people both within Intel and in the wider community.

Of course, all this open source stuff at work is not going to prevent me from hacking on other things at home; in fact it has given me renewed energy to work on my existing projects and even a new thing or two. More on that later.