Vote. Please.

I have the start of four other posts about the current Canadian parliamentary election in my drafts folder. I’ve been having a hard time collating my thoughts into something novel or interesting.

This election scares me and makes me profoundly sad for my country. That’s made it hard for me to get my thoughts together. Fortunately, Canadian constitutional expert Peter Russell does a better job than I could.

I’ve got an Ubuntu release party this weekend, but I’m hoping I get pull together some sort of substantial election post before the actual election.

Ubuntu Global Jam, April 2

[I'm going to Ubuntu Global Jam!]Ubuntu Waterloo is hosting our third Ubuntu Global Jam, Saturday, April 2 at Kwartzlab.

The Global Jam is a worldwide event to make Ubuntu better. Ubuntu 11.04, the Natty Narwhal will be released in a little over a month and the Global Jam give the community (that’s us) a chance to help find bugs, triage them and fix them.

Starting at 2pm, we’ll have an informal open space conference on the theme of contributing to Ubuntu (and open source in general) in the afternoon. If you have experience or questions, please bring them. In the evening, we can embark on whatever exciting project we were inspired to do in the afternoon.

Join us and help make Ubuntu better!

Clutter

A couple days ago, I gave a presentation on Clutter (the API for building animated graphical user interfaces for touchscreens and the like) to [KWLUG](kwlug.org). Here’s a shorter, screencast version of the presentation:

The slides themselves were created in python with Clutter. You can pull the source down from launchpad with `bzr branch lp:~dscassel/+junk/clutter-presentation/` if you have bzr.

Product Sashimi

*I wrote this post for the [Communitech blog](http://www.communitech.ca/category/blogs/). It’s cross-posted [here](http://www.communitech.ca/how-product-sashimi-gives-startups-some-wasabi/).*

Say you’re about to start designing a software product. You’ve got a few ideas and a blank whiteboard. You’ve gathered together people who understand the problem you’re trying to solve and the people who will value the solution.

You *could* brainstorm a bunch of features and start building them, but how do you know which features will actually be used and which will end up buried in some menu, untouched?

To avoid that, you need to get your product into the hands of users in order to get feedback (and revenue) as soon as possible. “Product Sashimi” is the term coined by [JB Rainsberger](http://jbrains.ca) for a set of techniques that help you thinly slice your product to deliver the simplest thing that could possibly work. Delivering a simple product early means you can find out directly from your users what additional features they would find valuable so you don’t have to build the ones they won’t.


Continue reading Product Sashimi

Tenth Anniversary

Ten years ago today, I posted [my first blog post](http://flyingsquirrel.ca/squirrel/archive.php?article=1).

Okay, technically, that was on my old, hand-coded blog, and I’m lame even after almost 4 years, I haven’t imported my old blog into this one, but woo! 10 years!

Equally technically, I was posting something like blog posts on my old homepage, starting around 1998 or so. They weren’t archived or anything, I’d just insert a couple paragraphs between <hr> tags on whatever I happened to feel like writing about at the time, replacing whatever was there before. No, not a blog, but my blog was an extension of that.

My ideas about blogging have changed quite a bit. I originally wanted a place I could write anonymously about whatever I felt like. Then I decided that blogging anonymously was horribly pretentious and nobody actually cared. Now I’ve got [Twitter](http://twitter.com/flying_squirrel) satiating most of what used to drive me to blog. That’s my current excuse for why I don’t hang out here quite as much, anyway.

Ten years. That’s a long time.

[Neil Gaiman beat me by a week](http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/02/now-we-are-ten.html).