Leaving Launchpad, going to work on Ubuntu

After four and a half years of working on Launchpad, I’m moving on within Canonical, taking a position on the Ubuntu Engineering team, working to get more and better apps on Ubuntu.

I am very excited about the change, but also a little sad, since it will mean leaving what has been the best team I’ve worked on. They are a wonderful bunch of people who not only get a lot of great stuff done, but consistently surprise me with their constant drive to get better at what they do.

Over the last couple of years, we have changed the way we are organized so that we can focus on building a small number of features at a time, the features that we do churn out are much, much better, we are rolling out new versions of Launchpad multiple times a week and we are actually paying off technical debt.

And they’ve needed to: Launchpad is a massive, ambitious application. I’ve never worked on something so big that aims to do so much, and with so few people actually hacking on it.

I still care a lot about Launchpad, It’s crammed with potential and has so much to offer the open source world. It’s going to be hard for me to move on.

But, wow, what a place to move on to, and what a time to do it. Ubuntu is aiming to go from about 20 million users to about 200 million, and to do that is going to need way, way more apps than they have now. To do that, we’ll need a spiffing developer programme, and that’s where I come in. I’ll be loading up on information, plans and more concrete goals in a couple of week’s time in Dublin, and will share them as I can.

Oh, and if you want to guide the world’s best open source development collaboration platform into the future, do drop me or Francis Lacoste a line.