A small 2017 retrospective

I don’t have a huge tendency to do new year resolutions, I’m more the continuous integration type of person where I make a resolution at any time of the year when it makes sense. One thing that did want to achieve as 2017 was starting out was to blog more, with an aim of at least one post a month, and preferably a post every two weeks. I didn’t quite make it with a total of ten posts for 2017, a total of two more than in 2016, so it was a slight improvement! If you count the fifteen draft posts that I wrote in the year, which in most cases just needs some tech details, or a couple of bug fixes to polish the details to actually post, I actually wasn’t that far from the a post every two weeks goal. Let’s see how I get on with this in the new year!

I also started full time into my IoT platform role, and to say it hasn’t been a completely expected roller coaster would be an understatement…. I love a good roller coaster and I think this is the biggest one I’ve ever climbed upon. I got involved in areas of IoT and components of the entire stack that I never thought I would be involved in. I seem to wear about 8 different hats, at last count, and it’s certainly been fun and interesting but busier than I expected, getting pulled into different things that I and others hadn’t planned or anticipated. It’s been a lot of fun, in the Fedora IoT space I didn’t achieve nearly as much as I had hoped but I had also not expected a few of the big blockers and other issues that slowed that down, thankfully it looks like a lot of that is pretty much resolved so I can start driving that forward early in the new year. I have lots of ideas here and this year we’ll start to build the IoT community in Fedora and by the end of the year I believe it’ll be fun and useful!

In the ARM space there was quite a lot of achievements. The big one being the initial support of aarch64 SBCs (finally!), I was very proud of the work we achieved here, it’s a single install path with uEFI/grub2 and a single install path. More work in the short term, by a team of cross team distro people, which took us a lot longer than I’d hoped, but the outcome is a lot better experience for end users and a much more supportable platform for those that need to support it moving forward! It was no means our only achievement with a lot of other ARM improvements including on the Raspberry Pi, accelerated GPUs, initial support for the 96boards platforms. Three is of coarse already LOTS of work in motion for the ARM architectures in 2018 and I’m sure it’ll be as fun and insanely busy as always but I feel we’re now going into it with a good base for the aarch64 SBCs which will rapidly expand in the devices we support moving forward!

Other than that I had a lot of travel, meetings, talks and other things. AFAICT I took around 35 flights, attended around a dozen conferences, numerous meetups and gave around 20 talks! A long with other Fedora and work commitments it was an overall insanely busy year! I somehow, with some of the bangs that 2018 has already shown us (and TBH I blame 2017 for meltdown/spectre) I doubt the coming year will be any quieter than the last… lets see if in among all of that I can meet the ~26 blog posts goal this time around?

One thought on “A small 2017 retrospective”

  1. Thanks for all the awesome work you do on fedora/arm! Better get started if you want 26 posts this year 😛

    Here’s an idea for one: is there a fedora equivalent to vcgencmd/libvchiq to talk to the rpi firmware and get information like CPU temperature and reasons for throttling?

Comments are closed.