Blog

AI-assisted tooling is becoming more and more common in the workflows of engineers at all experience levels. As I see it, our challenge is one of consideration, enablement and constraint.

We must enable those who opt-in to safely and responsibly harness the power of these tools, while respecting those who do not wish to have their platform defined or overwhelmed by this class of software.

Announcing work on upki, a universal tool for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems for handling X.509 certificate revocation lists in system utilities.

I recently had the privilege of attending the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 - an event hosted by Canonical to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 25.10, and provide a platform for open source projects from around the globe to showcase their work.

This post includes some personal highlights and a brief summary of some of the talks.

In February this year, I posted a manifesto to to modernise the design, build and release of Ubuntu.

This week, we released Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka, which was the first full engineering cycle under this new manifesto, This post is a look back at the progress made since that original post.

Immutable Linux distributions are gaining popularity due to their resilience and security, with mainstream operating systems adopting similar principles.

This post explores how different Linux distributions achieve immutability, the trade-offs, and why you should give it a try!

Packaging software is notoriously tricky. Every language, framework, and build system has its quirks, and the variety of artifact types — from Debian packages to OCI images and cloud images — only adds to the complexity.

This blog is a deep-dive on Canonical’s “craft” tools, how they evolved, and how to use them to simplify package maintenance.

Introducing Canonical’s new Debcrafters team, dedicated to maintaining the health of the Ubuntu Archive, but also to fostering collaboration among Linux distributions, including paid time to contribute elsewhere in the open source ecosystem.

This year, I moved from NixOS to Ubuntu. This post outlines my experience through that process, as well as a new philosophy for how I manage my machine and configuration which embraces the defaults and more contemporary applications.

We’re building a new, automated release system for Ubuntu to make releases more reliable, observable, and testable. To better inform the design of that process, we’re introducing monthly snapshot releases.

A follow up to “Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu” in which I describe the plan to migrate to sudo-rs by default in Ubuntu 25.10. Additionally, I cover some updates on the progress with uutils coreutils, and future plans for SequoiaPGP in APT and Ubuntu.

An article outlining my plan to revamp Ubuntu’s ‘project documentation’, illuminating the path for new contributors and enabling better distributed decision making.

This post explores modern equivalents of foundational system utilities such as coreutils and sudo, introduces an experimental utility for testing them, and maps out a path to their widespread adoption in Ubuntu.

Managing your time can be hard, particularly when occupying leadership positions. This is exacerbated by remote work, where the importance of owning your calendar is paramount both for you, and the people working with you.

A departure from my usual technical content, this post covers my lessons learned in managing my time, and my calendar while working remotely at Canonical over the past 4 years.

In the last week of January 2025, I was appointed VP Engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical, meaning I’ll oversee the Ubuntu Foundations, Server and Desktop teams going forward. This post outlines my vision for that role, and how I hope to evolve the distribution, the engineering practices behind it, and the community over the coming years.

Multipass’ GUI application recently got a huge rework. Implemented in Flutter, the GUI provides a much improved way to manage VMs. This post outlines the work I did to update the Multipass package in nixpkgs to build and include the Flutter application, which should serve as a useful reference for anyone looking to package a native Linux Flutter application in with Nix.