Just a week ago I made my way back from Linaro Connect. It is my first time at a Linaro Connect that was not jointly done with a UDS and even then I did not participate in the event. It was also my first time in Thailand and to a greater extent Asia so I was very interested in going.

The main purpose for attending was to show snappy and in particular, snapcraft. The part of snapcraft that I was going to show was related to building kernels, I must say I am quite pleased with the results.

My first two days at the event mostly involved attending the keynote and then going to the quiet not so quiet hacking room and work on supporting whatever my colleagues Ricardo and Alexander wanted to demo and present in their accepted talk.

In one of those two keynotes or in another random presentation I attended, I discovered (personally, others may have known already) that 96boards had released a working 4.4 kernel to support the 96boards initiative so those two days I spent polishing the kernel snapcraft plugin we had to be able to build a nice kernel snap for Ubuntu Core using the 96boards kernel, that was a success and part of what is being released today with snapcraft (a follow up post will describe how to make use of this plugin).

On day three, jetlag really kicked in so I zombie participated with some comments when relevant in some of the business and/or planning meetings that went on related to Canonical, this was really fun, during introductions it seems it was a nice ice breaker (even though not my intention) to say I’m just an engineer working on …. I felt I had to put emphasis on mentioning just after all other folk exchanged business cards (note to self: maybe get some business cards) and mentioned all these fancy titles :-)

On day four the main highlight from an Ubuntu point of view, was Alexander and Ricardo’s presentation.

I also briefly met some of the fine Qualcomm folk and it turns out they are running a maker’s contest

The last day was demo day mostly, so Ricardo and me setup a couple of snappy related demo’s, there was lot of interest across which left us pleased.

There was time to socialize as well and I did get to see some former Canonical faces and catch up a bit; there was also some spare time to get to know new people and that is always fun as well.

Given that I’ve never been to Bangkok before, the Saturday that followed was dedicated to some sightseeing.