Planet Ubuntu – joseeantonior

So, I’ve been in the job market for a bit over a year. I was part of a layoff cycle in my last company, and finding a new gig has been difficult. I haven’t been able to find something as of yet, but it’s been a learning curve. The market is not what it has been in the last couple of years. With AI in the mix, lots of roles have been eliminated, or have shifted towards where human intervention is needed to interpret or verify the data AI is interpreting. Job hunting is a job in an of itself, and may even take a 9 to 5 role. I know of a lot of people who have gone through the same process as myself, and wanted to share some of insights and tips from what I’ve learned throughout the last year.

First, and I think most important, is to understand that there’s a lot of great people around that you might have worked with. You can always ask for recommendations, touch base, or even have a small chat to see how things are going on their end. Conversations can be very refreshing, and can help you get a new perspective as how the industries are shifting, where you might want to learn new skills, or how to improve your positioning in the market. Folks can talk around and see if there’s additional positions where you might be a good fit, and it’s always good to have a helping hand (or a few). At the end of the day, these folks are your own community. I’ve gotten roles in the past by being referred, and these connections have been critical for my understanding of how different businesses may approach the same problem, or even to solve internal conflicts. So, reach out to people you know!

Like I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the market is evolving constantly. AI has taken a very solid role nowadays, and lots of companies ask about how you’ve used AI recently. Part of understanding the market is understanding the bleeding edge tools that are used to improve workflows and day-to-day efficiency. Research tools that are coming up, and that are shaping the market.

To give you an example. Haven’t tried AI yet? Give it a spin, even for simple questions. Understand where it works, where it fails, and how you, as a human, can make it work for you. Get a sense of the pitfalls, and where human intervention is needed to interpret or verify the data that’s in there. Like one of my former managers said, “trust, but verify”. Or, you can even get to the point of not trusting the data, and sharing that as a story!

Someone gave me the recommendation to apply to everything that I see where I “could be a fit”. While this might have its upsides, you might also end up in situations where you are not actually a fit, or where you don’t know the company and what it does. Always take the time, at least a few minutes, to understand the company that you’re applying for, research their values, and how they align to yours. Read about the product they’re creating, selling, or offering, and see if it’s a product where you could contribute your skills. Then, you can make the decision of applying. While doing this you may discover that you are applying to a position in a sector that you’re not interested in, or where your skillset might not be used to its full potential. And you might be missing out on some other opportunities that are significantly more aligned to you.

Also take the time to fully review the job description. JDs are pretty descriptive, and you might stumble upon certain details that don’t align with yourself, such as the salary, hours, location, or certain expectations that you might feel don’t fit within the role or that you are not ready for.

You landed an interview – congratulations! Make sure that you’ve researched the company before heading in. If you’ve taken a look at the company and the role before applying, take a glimpse again. You might find more interesting things, and it will demonstrate that you are actually preparing yourself for the interview. Also, interviewing is a two-way street. Make sure that you have some questions at the end. Double-check the role of your interviewer in the company, and ensure that you have questions that are tailored to their particular roles. Think about what you want to get from the interview (other than the job!).

There are many great job sources today – LinkedIn being the biggest of all of them. Throughout my searches I’ve also found weworkremotely.com and hnhiring.com are great sources. I strongly advise that you expand your search and find sources that are relevant to your particular role or industry. This has opened up a lot of opportunities for me!

I know that having a job is important. However, it’s also important to take time for yourself. Your mental health is important. You can use this time to develop some skills, play some games, take care of your garden, or even reorganize your home. Find a hobby and distract yourself every now and then. Take breaks, and ensure you’re not over-stressing yourself. Read a bit about burnout, and take care of yourself, as burnout can also happen from job hunting. And if you need a breather, make sure you take one, but don’t overdo it! Time is valuable, so it’s all about finding the right balance.

Hopefully this is helpful for some folks that are going through my same situation. What other things have worked for you? Do you have any other tips you could share? I’d be happy to read about them! Share them with me on LinkedIn. I’m also happy to chat – you can always find me at jose@ubuntu.com.

To all the people I have interacted with in freenode, and to all the contributors I have worked with over there:

I recently celebrated my 10-year anniversary of having an account in freenode. I have a lot of fond memories, met a lot of amazing people in that period of time.

Some time ago, the former head of freenode staff sold `freenode ltd` (a holding company) to a third party, Andrew Lee[1], under terms that have not been disclosed to the staff body. Mr Lee at the time had promised to never exercise any operational control over freenode.

In the past few weeks, this has changed[2][3], and the existance of a legal threat to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know the substance of this legal threat as it contains some kind of gag order preventing its broader discussion within staff.

As a result, Mr Lee now has operational control over the freenode IRC network. I cannot stand by such a (hostile?) corporate takeover of the freenode network, and I am resigning as a staff volunteer along with most other freenode staff. We simply do not feel that the network now remains independent after two heads of staff appear to have been compelled to make changes to our git repo for the website[4].

We are founding a new network with the same goals and ambitions: libera.chat.

You can connect to the new network at `irc.libera.chat`, ssl port 6697 (and the usual clearnet port).

We’re really sorry it’s had to come to this, and hope that you’re willing to work with us to make libera a success, independent from outside control.

Whether Ubuntu decides to stay on freenode or move to libera would be a decision of the Ubuntu IRC Council. Please refer to them with any questions you might have. While I am a part of the Community Council, the IRC Council operates independently, and I will personally leave the final decision to them.

[1]: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10308021/officers

[2]: A blogpost has been removed without explanation: https://freenode.net/news/freenode-reorg (via the wayback machine)

[3]: The freenode testnet, for experimental deployment and testing of new server features was shutdown on Friday 30th April, for reasons that have not been disclosed to us.

[4]: Unexplained change to shells.com as our sponsor: web-7.0/pull/489, followed by a resignation: web-7.0/pull/493

Our world is changing every day. Drastic changes can happen really quickly. Technology is advancing at a much faster pace than it used to a hundred years ago, and humans are adapting to those changes. The way we think, the way we operate, and how even how we communicate has drastically changed in the last 15 years.

Just as humans change, the Ubuntu community is also changing. People interact in different ways. Platforms that did not exist before are now available, and the community changes as the humans in it change as well.

When we started the Local Communities project several years ago, we did it with the sole purpose of celebrating Ubuntu. The ways in which we celebrated included release parties, conferences, and gatherings in IRC. However, we have lately seen a decline in the momentum we had with regards to participation in this project. We have not done a review of the project since its inception, and inevitably, the Community Council believes that it is time to do a deep dive at how we can regain that momentum and continue getting together to celebrate Ubuntu.

As such, we are putting together the Local Communities Research Committee, an independent entity overseen by the Community Council, which will help us understand the behavior of Local Community teams, how to better adapt to their needs, and to create a model that is suitable for the world we are living in today.

We are looking for between 6 and 9 people, and we will require to have at least one person per continent. We require that you are an Ubuntu Member, are not a current Community Council member, have experience working with worldwide communities, and strongly recommend that you have participated with a Local Community team in the past. If this sounds like you, instructions on how to apply can be found here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/local-communities-research-committee/20186/4

I am personally very excited about this project, as it will allow us to gather perspectives from people all around the world, and to better adapt the project for you, the community.

If you have any questions or want to chat with me, you can always reach out to me at jose at ubuntu dot com, or jose on irc.freenode.net.

Eager to see your nominations/applications!

This September 15th, my Ubuntu Membership will turn six years old. I’ve been with the community for a long time now (not as long as others!), and I’ve learned a lot along the way. So far, I have only done volunteer work, and, a couple months ago, I decided I needed to take the next step. Now that I’m 20, I need to find a real job.

After searching for a while, the hunt ended up being fruitful. As of September 1st, I will start working with Hiperderecho, a Peruvian NGO. In short, Hiperderecho loves that everyone can enjoy the Internet freely, and promotes and defends digital rights and freedoms. I will be joining them as their Director of Community, and can’t be more happy that an opportunity such as this one has popped up.

No, I won’t stop studying (yes, I’m still in school). No, I won’t stop contributing to the Ubuntu community. In fact, I will be at SeaGL, giving a talk about how worldwide communities interact with each other, as well as helping run the Ubuntu booth. If you’re in the area, come by and say hi!

And that’s all from me now. I’m sure this will be an opportunity for learning and growing both personally and professionally, and can’t wait to start!

Are you from the US Northwest area? Have something cool to tell or show from the open source world? Then you should apply to give a talk at SeaGL this year!

SeaGL is a grassroots technical conference, taking place in Seattle, WA, United States in October 6-7th. It’s dedicated to spreading knowledge about the GNU/Linux community and free/libre/open-source software/hardware. I went last year, and there’s a lot of cool people with amazing stories on multiple open source topics. Now, we want to hear from you.

I’m sure there’s a lot of you with cool projects that you want to share with the world. Go ahead! This fourth year there’s 20-minute talks, where you can give a quick introduction to your piece of software/hardware, or 50-minute talks, where you can do a demo, and go in-depth about your project. Is it going to be your first talk ever? SeaGL is a great place to get started! Have questions about your talk proposal? They have weekly office hours in the #seagl channel on freenode to give you a hand!

Conferences like SeaGL are powered by their own attendees, so it’d be great to see new faces around showing off amazing stuff. I hope to see many new names on the schedule, as well as some other familiar ones.  Propose a talk, and hopefully, I’ll see you in October! And hurry – CFP closes on August 6th, midnight PDT.

It’s my pleasure to announce UbuCon Latin America 2017! For a third consecutive year, we’ll be holding it at the University of Lima, Peru. This year’s conference will take place August 18-19th.

UbuCon Latin America is a conference where people from LatAm and the rest of the world get together to discuss the state of the art of Ubuntu, as well as cool things you can do with it. We are planning on two days full of Ubuntu topics!

Travel and accommodation information can be found here.

We would also like you to participate. If you have a talk you’d like to present, please fill out the call for papers. It will only be open for a couple weeks. After that, we’ll be publishing our schedule.

Would you like to sponsor UbuCon Latin America this year? Send an email to jose@ubuntu.com and we’ll get back in touch!

I hope to see you all in Lima, Peru in just a couple months!

I personally stopped blogging a while ago, but I kinda feel this is a necessary blog post. A while ago, a professor used the term Community Manager interchangeably with Social Media Manager. I made a quick comment about them not being the same, and later some friends started questioning my reasoning.

Last week during OSCON, I was chatting with a friend about this same topic. A startup asked me to help them as a community manager about a year ago. I gladly accepted, but then they just started assigning me social media work.

And these are not the only cases. I have seen several people use both terms interchangeably, which they are not. I guess it’s time for me to burst the bubble that has been wrapped around both terms.

In order to do that, let’s explain, in very simple words, the job of both of them. Let’s start with the social media managers. Their job is, as the title says, to manage social media channels. Post on Facebook, respond to Twitter replies, make sure people feel welcome when they visit any of the social media channels, and automatically represent the brand/product through social media.

Community managers, on the other side, focus on building communities around a product or service. To put it simpler, they make sure that there’s people that care about the product, that contribute to the ecosystem, that work with the provider to make it better. Social media management is a part of their job. It is a core function, because it is one of the channels that allow them to communicate with people to hear their concerns and project the provider’s voice about the product. However, it is not their only job. They also have to go out and meet with people, in real life. Talk with higher-ups to voice the concerns. Hear how the product is impacting people’s life in order to make a change, or continue on the same good path.

With this, I’m not trying to devalue the work of social media managers. On the other hand, they are have a very valuable job. Imagine all those companies with social media profiles, without the funny comments. No message replies if you had a question. Horrible, right? Managing these channels is as important, so brands/products are ‘alive’ on the interwebs. Being a community manager is not only managing a channel. Therefore, they are not comparable jobs.

Each of the positions is different, even though they complement each other pretty well. But I hope that with this post you can understand a little bit more about the inside job of both community managers and social media managers. In a fast-paced world like ours today, these two can make a huge difference between having a presence online, or not. So, next time, if you’re looking for a community manager, don’t expect them to do only social media work. And viceversa – if you’re looking for a social media manager, don’t expect them to build community out of social media.

Hey everyone!

And here I am, packing to go in yet another adventure. If you are near the Seattle area, I encourage you to go to SeaGl, a volunteer-ran conference. I will be speaking about Juju, and we’ll also have an Ubuntu table!

On the other hand, I will also be at UbuCon Europe. If you are in Germany, make sure to attend!

If you are going to be at any of those conferences, make sure to come by and say hi – I’d love to see you.

Time to jump on a plane!

Hey everyone! Just a quick announcement that Ubuntu and Juju will be at Ohio Linux Fest this weekend. The event takes place at the Hyatt Regency Columbus, in Columbus, OH on Friday and Saturday. If you can drop by, please say hi!

I will be giving a talk about Juju on Saturday at 3pm. Ubuntu will be running a table as well. If you are going to be attending the event, please drop by the table. We’ll have some Ubuntu phones for demo, I can help you with Juju stuff, and some other community members will be there as well. If you have an Official Ubuntu Book, 9th Edition, I’d be happy to sign it for you. Elizabeth K. Joseph is going to be at the event as well, so you can get signatures from two different authors!

If you want to volunteer at the Ubuntu table we’ll be having, please drop me an email to jose@ubuntu.com. Otherwise, come by, we can grab a coffee or dinner after the event. Looking forward to seeing you soon!

Hello everyone! This is a guest post by Menno Smits, who works on the Juju team. He originally announced this great news in the Juju mailing list (which you should all subscribe to!), and I thought it was definitely worth to announce in the Planet. Stay tuned to the mailing list for more great announcements, which I feel are going to come now that we are moving to RCs of Juju 2.0.

Juju 2.0 is just around the corner and there’s so much great stuff in the release. It really is streets ahead of the 1.x series.

One improvement that’s recently landed is that the Juju client will now work on any Linux distribution. Up until now, the client hasn’t been usable on variants of Linux for which Juju didn’t have explicit support (Ubuntu and CentOS). This has now been fixed – the client will now work on any Linux distribution. Testing has been done with Fedora, Debian and Arch, but any Linux distribution should now be OK to use.

It’s worth noting that when using local Juju binaries (i.e. a `juju` and `jujud` which you’ve built yourself or that someone has sent you), checks in the `juju bootstrap` command have been relaxed. This way, a Juju client running on any Linux flavour can bootstrap a controller running any of the supported Ubuntu series. Previously, it wasn’t possible for a client running a non-Ubuntu distribution to bootstrap a Juju controller using local Juju binaries.

All this is great news for people who are wanting to get started with Juju but are not running Ubuntu on their workstations. These changes will be available in the Juju 2.0 rc1 release.