Tim Andersson | Contributing Developer Application

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Tim Andersson | Ubuntu Contributing Developer Application

About Me

Hello! My name’s Tim Andersson. I’m a Canonical employee for about 14 months now, in the Ubuntu Release Management Team (fka Canonical Ubuntu QA Team).

My journey with ubuntu started in something like 2020 (time is a blur sometimes). I was doing my masters degree in Robotics at the time. We were using bionic and ros (Robotic Operating System, for those who don’t know).

This was my first ever usage of a Unix system. One of the first things I did, early on in the masters course, after getting irritated by having to write sudo all the time, was changing the ownership of my / partition. Lesson learnt. Reviving my machine only sparked my interest more!

Since then, I’ve used Ubuntu for every piece of development since. I worked in a factory with mobile robots for a little while, all running bionic, and then after that I was working in a company developing surgical robots, also using ubuntu.

I’d like to apply to become a Contributing Developer.

Contributions - present and past

  • Attending each release sprint in London with the release team - isotesting and small release tasks such as validating torrents

  • Attended MiniDebConf in Cambridge

  • Fixing bugs and fighting fires for upstream stakeholders of autopkgtest.ubuntu.com

autopkgtest

autopkgtest-cloud

You can see my full list of commits on this repo here :slight_smile:

britney

meta-release

ubuntu-archive-tools

  • I automated one small step of the release process :slight_smile: a torrent checking script

  • I have an MP open right now which adds a script for parsing britney logs

+1 maintenance

  • I’ve done a lot of requeue-ing of autopkgtests with different triggers etc in an effort to get the tests to pass

  • Recently force-badtest’d python-oauth2client - the package is being deprecated and is blocking other packages from migrating

  • Made a bug to remove python-certbot-dns-google from the archive for oracular - due to issues with python-oauth2client

LPCI

LPCI isn’t a core part of my role, but I’m working on it for fun

  • Currently working on an MP adding deb822 support to lpci

  • Have an MP open which fixes a bug

upgrade testing

I work regularly on auto-upgrade-testing, monitoring the jobs with my team, as well as reproducing any reported upgrade related bugs on my test laptop

iso testing

  • Hundreds of desktop installer tests

  • isotracker maintenance (iso.qa.ubuntu.com) - updating testcases and suites and liaising with flavor leads etc

  • Currently working on a new greenfield project which automates installer testing on hardware we have in a lab - I wrote all of the scripts and jenkins jobs surrounding the testing, as well as the test scripts themselves. The repo is here, and is nearly production ready :slight_smile: just ironing out some small issues towards the end of this project. Soon, we should have a wide range of coverage for all installer testing! Yay! Please ignore my commit history on that branch btw, it needs squashing hehe

  • Wrote openqa tests for the desktop installer also - we should have an openqa instance in the future so I wrote a suite of tests in preparation

  • I also attend monthly meetings with members of the openqa community from various distros - you can see info on this monthly meeting here

cdimage

  • Added CI to ubuntu-cdimage

ubuntu-release-upgrader

  • fixed a bug in the upgrader

Goals for future contributions

  • Something I’ve had my eyes set on recently, is to help out with maintenance and development of LPCI. I’ve started this work recently - autopkgtest-cloud and other projects I work on utilise LPCI, and it’s very widely used around the entirety of Launchpad. I hope to become an active contributor in the near future - I’ve spoke with some maintainers of the project and my next steps are to start solving any bugs that have been left unattended.

  • I’d like to contribute in some way to OpenQA. I attended a talk last month, with members from all around the OSS community that utilise and employ OpenQA in some way. The talk is monthly and I’ll continue to attend, and hopefully apply the insight garnered from these talks to our own OpenQA instance for Ubuntu. My hope is that as I get more familiar with OpenQA, and use it regularly, I’ll become competent enough with it to become an active contributor.

  • I’d like to start doing more +1 maintenance for the desktop and foundations teams. I’ve done a bit in the past, but not enough.

  • Smooth out the release process wherever I can - even just small scripts to make tedious steps faster is a bonus!

  • Further refactoring and improvement for autopkgtest-cloud - a lot of work has been done in the last year, however, there’s still a lot left to do!

  • Continued work on the hardware-installer-testing - I want to see it production ready and reliable in the coming weeks. I hope it will provide developers with plenty of data to fix installer bugs, and help us find installer bugs a lot faster.

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