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Martin Pitt: InstructLab evaluation with Ansible and Wordle
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 3 days ago - 00:00
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Michael Meeks: 2025-05-07 Wednesday
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 5 days ago - 10:50
- Mail chew, signed visa papers for another great COOL Days attendee, just under a month to go: exciting.
- Sync with Dave & Laser.
- Published the next strip around resolving apparently irreconcileable differences: "show me the road"
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Thibault Martin: Deep Work reconciled me with personal growth books
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 5 days ago - 09:00 • 2 minutes
- Decide the length of your deep work sessions, establish a ritual for them, keep track of your consistency and hold yourself accountable to it, and refrain from overworking since it decreases your global productivity.
- Since the Internet can be very distracting, establish some time blocks with Internet and some without, and enforce the rule strictly even if it seems silly.
- Pick up the right tools for your job by assessing the positive but also the negative impact. Most of the time that means "get off social media." Also avoid fast-paced entertainment since it can undo all the day training and embrace boredom as a way to train your focus.
- Use every minute of your day intentionally by scheduling them, even if that means redoing your schedule several time as new priorities emerge. Quantify the depth of your work and ask your boss for a shallow work budget. Finish early so your day is tightly time boxed and shallow work becomes even more expensive (so easier to refuse). Become hard to reach so you don't spend your day in your inbox.
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Michael Meeks: 2025-05-06 Tuesday
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 6 days ago - 21:00
- Up very early, bid 'bye to A & J, breakfast with B. power cut - power restored.
- Planning call, finished mail, tested some tickets, read some code changes.
- Out for lunch into town with J. and B.
- Back for a partner call, sync with Laser, wider partner meeting, admin.
- Dinner with B, call with A, and E. - all well.
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Felipe Borges: It’s alive! Welcome to the new Planet GNOME!
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 6 days ago - 15:46
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Steven Deobald: Introducing Myself
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 6 days ago - 11:48 • 6 minutes
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Steven Deobald: Introducing Myself
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 6 days ago - 11:48 • 6 minutes
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Richard Hughes: Prem’Day 2025 – Firmware Update Management with LVFS & fwupd
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 7 days ago - 18:41
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Richard Hughes: Prem’Day 2025 – Firmware Update Management with LVFS & fwupd
news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 7 days ago - 18:41
I'm usually not a huge fan of personal growth books. As I pointed out in my Blinkist review , most books of this genre are 300 pages long when all the content would fit on 20. I read Deep Work by Cal Newport, with an open but skeptical mind.
A case for deep work
The book is split in two main sections. In the first section, the author makes a case for deep work. He argues that deep work is economically viable because it can help you learn new skills fast, a distinctive trait to successful people in tech, especially when competing with increasingly intelligent machines. This argument is surprisingly timely now, at the peak of the AI bubble.
He then explains that deep work is rare because in the absence of clear indicators of productivity, most people default to appearing very active shuffling things around. This argument clearly resonated with my experience for all my career.
Newport closes the first section by explaining why deep work is actually important for us humans because it limits our exposure to pettiness, makes us empirically happier than shallow work, and because it helps us find meaning to our work.
Rules for deep work
In the second section, the author lays out the four rules to enable deep work:
An insightful book
Like in all personal growth books, storytelling takes many pages in Deep Work , but here it supports nicely the argument of the author. The book was pleasant to read and helped me question my relationship to technology and work.
In the first section the author backs his claims about the importance of focus with evidences from academic studies. Of course since the second section is all about establishing new rules to allow deep work, it's not possible to have proofs that it works. With that said, I bought a late edition and would have liked an "augmented" conclusion with evidence from people who used the methodology successfully in the real world.
You can find my key takeaways from the book by having a look at my reading notes .
A few months ago, I announced that I was working on a new implementation of Planet GNOME, powered by GitLab Pages . This work has reached a point where we’re ready to flip the switch and replace the old Planet website.
You can check it out at planet.gnome.org
This was only possible thanks to various other contributors, such as Jakub Steiner, who did a fantastic job with the design and style, and Alexandre Franke, who helped with various papercuts, ideas, and improvements.
As with any software, there might be regressions and issues. It would be a great help if you report any problems you find at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/planet.gnome.org/-/issues
Here’s to blogs, RSS feeds, and the open web!
I’m incredibly excited to serve the GNOME Foundation as its new full-time Executive Director.
As Richard mentioned , I am receiving the baton from him, after his tenure as the GNOME Foundation’s interim Executive Director. Richard helped guide the Foundation through some rough terrain and, after all that, I’m especially grateful that Richard has been so generous with his time. All the best, Richard. Thank you for everything you do! It always feels good to make a new friend like Richard and I don’t think he’ll be a stranger to the GNOME community, even once he’s neck-deep in his PhD thesis.
It is precisely that community — that global network of friends — that has me so excited to work with the GNOME Foundation. The word “excited” really doesn’t do it justice. I have been involved in many free software , open design , and open docs efforts over the years . But none of those have the gargantuan history, community, and installed base of GNOME. It is a privilege to serve GNOME, and I’m grateful. That gratitude is the entire reason I’m here and I’d like to take the rest of this post to explain where that feeling comes from — and what I hope to do with it.
## My story
Since I am new to the GNOME community, I’ll start by sharing some background on myself.
I grew up in a village of 1000 people in western Canada and, within that village, I was unquestionably “that computer nerd kid.” I built a graphical MUD before the term “MMORPG” was coined. The code was awful. I started my first web development company when I was 15 years old. It was very 1996.
I started a couple more businesses in University, around the time I started using Linux and GNOME: MonoHost, which provided ASP.net webhosting on Linux, and a small software consultancy. Neither of those stuck.
After University, my professional software career can be broken down into two 10-year chunks: pre-crash and post-crash.
The first ten years is a blur. I joined ThoughtWorks when they had fewer than 500 employees, got involved in the early agile (lower-case “a”) software movements, used Rails before 1.0, wrote C#, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and Clojure, joined DRW, built large distributed systems, led teams, got bored, moved to India, and started Nilenso Software with seven friends. Nilenso Software is India’s first employee-owned technology cooperative and it still exists today.
Two years into Nilenso, I had a bicycle crash and three botched eye surgeries while visiting a client in California. I was left partly blind. I have a crushed optic nerve, vitrectomy, and scleral buckle. (I suggest… not looking up example videos.)
After the bicycle crash, I found it difficult to code — or even use a computer at all, at certain contrasts. White backgrounds, for example, still cause me instant headaches. And so I began a decade of recruiting, sales, management, startups, fundraising, and product consulting. After leaving Nilenso, I volunteered with nonprofits and worked on two open source database products: XTDB and Endatabas . After closing down Endatabas, I began interviewing with the GNOME Foundation, which brings me here.
I moved back to Canada during Covid and I now live in Halifax, on the east coast. (One timezone east of New York, Europeans will be happy to note!) I still ride bicycles. I run in the park, swim in the ocean, canoe to islands, and climb rocks. I play board games. I write a little code on weekends. I meditate Vipassana. I have an off-grid cabin by the ocean that requires constant repairs. I drive an old truck. Due to an inside joke that went too far, I only wear black suits with white shirts. On any given day, I can smoothly transition between business meetings, weddings, and funerals. As one does.
Over the past three decades, I have been inspired by many open source projects but the aspect of GNOME that inspires me the most is the clarity of its mission. There is never any disagreement about the mission: GNOME is a universal computing environment. It is for everyone, everywhere.
I’m in awe of this.
If you’ve ever been involved in the creation of a software product, you’ll appreciate just how exceptional it is for one product (especially one so large) to retain a single mission like this for a quarter century. That kind of continuity doesn’t just magically happen. Let’s talk about that for a second.
## Gratitude
Over the past few days, with each conversation I’ve had with folks in the community, I found myself increasingly grateful for the decades of work put into GNOME. A person forgets just how much time, energy, leadership, and passion has gone into a project of this size.
I’ve been using GNOME since 2002. By the late 2000s, it was becoming very easy to take GNOME for granted. By GNOME 3, it’s safe to say I did take GNOME for granted. This is a good thing, in a way. We take the water utility or electricity in our homes for granted precisely because they work so perfectly and invisibly that their origins can be forgotten.
But GNOME isn’t financed by billions of tax dollars. It’s easy to forget that, too. My friends and colleagues over the years have compared GNOME to MacOS and Windows, apples-to-apples, as if GNOME were also built by a 3-trillion-dollar corporation. If your open source project is compared favourably to competitors with a $6T aggregate market cap, you’re doing something right.
This continuity is magical, but it’s magic created by the many contributors who make GNOME happen, release to release, year after year.
I don’t want to feel this gratitude alone. As part of our work at the Foundation, I hope we can bring this feeling to many of GNOME’s users.
## Transparency
Bringing that feeling to users means showing them the people and processes behind GNOME. None of us can understand infrastructure like GNOME without a window into it. So many of the systems we rely on every day are hidden from us. I have always loved this Hans Rosling comment:
Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the number of opportunities I have to feel grateful to civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies. These are the invisible people working in a web of related services that make up society’s institutions. These are the people we should celebrate when things are going well.
The contributors, maintainers, board members, and Foundation staff are these plumbers. Even in my short few days with the Foundation, I’ve seen everyone working hard behind the scenes to keep the lights on and ensure GNOME 49 will be a success, even if it feels like GNOME 48 was just released moments ago.
I want millions of GNOME users to see what I’ve had the privilege to see: the life and energy of the folks who keep GNOME running for us.
We should celebrate. We have every reason to.
## Intentions
Of course, transparency isn’t a switch we can just turn on. It’s a constant effort we apply to our own processes. It’s iterative. It’s work. But it can also be fun! Knowing that everyone else is trying their hardest can be the most energizing motivation, and I’m excited to help.
Beyond transparency, I hope we can re-establish the GNOME Foundation’s … well, foundations. The Foundation exists to support GNOME, to support design and development, to support contributors.
A big part of this is financial stability. Ultimately, the Foundation should support new growth. But to begin with, we need bedrock.
One word to describe these intentions is resilience : across finances, people, documentation, and processes. Let’s build an environment that lasts another 27 years.

I’m incredibly excited to serve the GNOME Foundation as its new full-time Executive Director.
As Richard mentioned , I am receiving the baton from him, after his tenure as the GNOME Foundation’s interim Executive Director. Richard helped guide the Foundation through some rough terrain and, after all that, I’m especially grateful that Richard has been so generous with his time. All the best, Richard. Thank you for everything you do! It always feels good to make a new friend like Richard and I don’t think he’ll be a stranger to the GNOME community, even once he’s neck-deep in his PhD thesis.
It is precisely that community — that global network of friends — that has me so excited to work with the GNOME Foundation. The word “excited” really doesn’t do it justice. I have been involved in many free software , open design , and open docs efforts over the years . But none of those have the gargantuan history, community, and installed base of GNOME. It is a privilege to serve GNOME, and I’m grateful. That gratitude is the entire reason I’m here and I’d like to take the rest of this post to explain where that feeling comes from — and what I hope to do with it.
## My story
Since I am new to the GNOME community, I’ll start by sharing some background on myself.
I grew up in a village of 1000 people in western Canada and, within that village, I was unquestionably “that computer nerd kid.” I built a graphical MUD before the term “MMORPG” was coined. The code was awful. I started my first web development company when I was 15 years old. It was very 1996.
I started a couple more businesses in University, around the time I started using Linux and GNOME: MonoHost, which provided ASP.net webhosting on Linux, and a small software consultancy. Neither of those stuck.
After University, my professional software career can be broken down into two 10-year chunks: pre-crash and post-crash.
The first ten years is a blur. I joined ThoughtWorks when they had fewer than 500 employees, got involved in the early agile (lower-case “a”) software movements, used Rails before 1.0, wrote C#, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and Clojure, joined DRW, built large distributed systems, led teams, got bored, moved to India, and started Nilenso Software with seven friends. Nilenso Software is India’s first employee-owned technology cooperative and it still exists today.
Two years into Nilenso, I had a bicycle crash and three botched eye surgeries while visiting a client in California. I was left partly blind. I have a crushed optic nerve, vitrectomy, and scleral buckle. (I suggest… not looking up example videos.)
After the bicycle crash, I found it difficult to code — or even use a computer at all, at certain contrasts. White backgrounds, for example, still cause me instant headaches. And so I began a decade of recruiting, sales, management, startups, fundraising, and product consulting. After leaving Nilenso, I volunteered with nonprofits and worked on two open source database products: XTDB and Endatabas . After closing down Endatabas, I began interviewing with the GNOME Foundation, which brings me here.
I moved back to Canada during Covid and I now live in Halifax, on the east coast. (One timezone east of New York, Europeans will be happy to note!) I still ride bicycles. I run in the park, swim in the ocean, canoe to islands, and climb rocks. I play board games. I write a little code on weekends. I meditate Vipassana. I have an off-grid cabin by the ocean that requires constant repairs. I drive an old truck. Due to an inside joke that went too far, I only wear black suits with white shirts. On any given day, I can smoothly transition between business meetings, weddings, and funerals. As one does.
Over the past three decades, I have been inspired by many open source projects but the aspect of GNOME that inspires me the most is the clarity of its mission. There is never any disagreement about the mission: GNOME is a universal computing environment. It is for everyone, everywhere.
I’m in awe of this.
If you’ve ever been involved in the creation of a software product, you’ll appreciate just how exceptional it is for one product (especially one so large) to retain a single mission like this for a quarter century. That kind of continuity doesn’t just magically happen. Let’s talk about that for a second.
## Gratitude
Over the past few days, with each conversation I’ve had with folks in the community, I found myself increasingly grateful for the decades of work put into GNOME. A person forgets just how much time, energy, leadership, and passion has gone into a project of this size.
I’ve been using GNOME since 2002. By the late 2000s, it was becoming very easy to take GNOME for granted. By GNOME 3, it’s safe to say I did take GNOME for granted. This is a good thing, in a way. We take the water utility or electricity in our homes for granted precisely because they work so perfectly and invisibly that their origins can be forgotten.
But GNOME isn’t financed by billions of tax dollars. It’s easy to forget that, too. My friends and colleagues over the years have compared GNOME to MacOS and Windows, apples-to-apples, as if GNOME were also built by a 3-trillion-dollar corporation. If your open source project is compared favourably to competitors with a $6T aggregate market cap, you’re doing something right.
This continuity is magical, but it’s magic created by the many contributors who make GNOME happen, release to release, year after year.
I don’t want to feel this gratitude alone. As part of our work at the Foundation, I hope we can bring this feeling to many of GNOME’s users.
## Transparency
Bringing that feeling to users means showing them the people and processes behind GNOME. None of us can understand infrastructure like GNOME without a window into it. So many of the systems we rely on every day are hidden from us. I have always loved this Hans Rosling comment:
Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the number of opportunities I have to feel grateful to civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies. These are the invisible people working in a web of related services that make up society’s institutions. These are the people we should celebrate when things are going well.
The contributors, maintainers, board members, and Foundation staff are these plumbers. Even in my short few days with the Foundation, I’ve seen everyone working hard behind the scenes to keep the lights on and ensure GNOME 49 will be a success, even if it feels like GNOME 48 was just released moments ago.
I want millions of GNOME users to see what I’ve had the privilege to see: the life and energy of the folks who keep GNOME running for us.
We should celebrate. We have every reason to.
## Intentions
Of course, transparency isn’t a switch we can just turn on. It’s a constant effort we apply to our own processes. It’s iterative. It’s work. But it can also be fun! Knowing that everyone else is trying their hardest can be the most energizing motivation, and I’m excited to help.
Beyond transparency, I hope we can re-establish the GNOME Foundation’s … well, foundations. The Foundation exists to support GNOME, to support design and development, to support contributors.
A big part of this is financial stability. Ultimately, the Foundation should support new growth. But to begin with, we need bedrock.
One word to describe these intentions is resilience : across finances, people, documentation, and processes. Let’s build an environment that lasts another 27 years.
A few weeks ago I was invited to talk about firmware updates for servers using fwupd/LVFS at Prem’Day 2025 . I gave the hardware vendors a really hard time, and got lots of instant feedback from customers in the the audience from the “little green thumbs” that people could raise. The main takeaway from the Prem’Day community seemed to be that proprietary tooling adds complexity without value, and using open ecosystems enable users to better operate their infrastructure.
Since getting back to the UK I’ve had some really interesting discussions with various companies; there might be some nice announcements soon.

A few weeks ago I was invited to talk about firmware updates for servers using fwupd/LVFS at Prem’Day 2025 . I gave the hardware vendors a really hard time, and got lots of instant feedback from customers in the the audience from the “little green thumbs” that people could raise. The main takeaway from the Prem’Day community seemed to be that proprietary tooling adds complexity without value, and using open ecosystems enable users to better operate their infrastructure.
Since getting back to the UK I’ve had some really interesting discussions with various companies; there might be some nice announcements soon.
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