Some of you might know that I was and in part still am a Gentoo user as well. I always found something reassuring in watching terminal with compilation going on. It is a nice sight. Compiler crunching all those sources and preparing something new for you. On some conference I even saw Gentoo guys showing a recording of Gentoo installation – a lot of compilation in there. I really liked it and I thought that it would make a nice screensaver.

Lately I have been playing a lot with some cool technologies. I had a lot of fun, so I want to share some of it and at least point you to the interesting pieces of technology to check out. And it also inspired me to my new project which I would like to introduce with this blog post.

ZeroMQ & friends

Lets start with ZeroMQ. It is lightweight messaging library with really nice API. And the tools around it? CZMQ brings even nicer API and there is also zproto which let’s you generate protocol handling code and even state machines easily. You just describe it and zproto will generate all the code for you. I know that you might think that code generation is evil. And quite some time it is. But this one is not 🙂 Generated code is nice, readable and it really helps with productivity. You don’t have to write copy&paste code and drown yourself in writing stuff that was written thousand times before already. You can concentrate on the logic of your application – the only important part – and disregard all those irrelevant boring processing functions. So ZeroMQ in combination with zproto is one of the interesting stuff I’ve been playing with lately. And I would recommend you to do so as well 🙂

You might have noticed that I decided to run for the openSUSE Board. And as we shortly have a new year and everybody is evaluating the past and the future, I will do the similar, mainly focusing on few of the challenges that I see laying in front of the openSUSE Board in 2015.

SUSE/openSUSE relation

I heard it being mentioned several times over and over. SUSE and openSUSE are two different things. But at the same time, they are pretty close. Close enough to be confusing. We have similar yet slightly distinct branding. Similar yet slightly distinct name and we have a clear overlap in terms of contributors. For people inside the project, it is easy to distinguish the entities. For people outside, not so much.

Hi everybody, openSUSE elections are just around the corner and I decided to step forward and run for the seat in The Board. For those who don’t know me and would like to know why consider me as an option, here is my platform.

Who am I?

I’m about 30 years old, live in Prague and I love openSUSE (and Gentoo 😉 ). SUSE 6.3 was my first Linux distribution, I went through som more and I actively joined the openSUSE community more than six years ago. I was for five years working for SUSE as openSUSE Boosters and package maintainer. I was also part of the Prague openSUSE Conference organization team. Nowadays I work for company called Eaton (in open source team), but I still love openSUSE, have plenty of friends in both SUSE and openSUSE, poke some packages from time to time and I’m spreading open source in general and openSUSE in particular wherever I go (we have few openSUSE servers at work now, yay).

In September I visited Akademy in Brno. It was close and sounded interesting (and it was). I met there Bruno and Francoise and tried to help them a little bit with openSUSE booth they organized. It was cool, wasn’t sure how many people I will know there, but I met Cornelius on my way to the venue and when we arrived there, there was already openSUSE booth – really great surprise 🙂 But getting to the point of this post (which is not the Akademy), there was a lottery where people could won Raspberry Pi. I already have better ARM board at home, but as I depend on that one as a home server so I can’t play with it that much anymore, I joined anyway. And to my surprise I won! As I had to leave before the draw, I have to thank Bruno and Francoise for fetching it up and sending it to me, so big thanks to them for everything!

I was browsing around the Internet (don’t remember what for) and I accidentally found one cool aspect of MariaDB. There is a feedback plugin and this short post is meant to encourage you to use it!

Ok, so what it does and why should you opt-in to be spied on 🙂 It takes some information about your MariaDB server including it’s usage and it will send it to the MariaDB folks. It doesn’t send private data from your database. It sends stuff like what OS are you running, what version of various plugins, how did you tweaked the default settings and also how big and how busy is your server. Now a short list of why I turned this on:

One of the things, that I really like about Jolla is the technology to write applications. C++ is my favorite programing language and I always admired Qt. At least big parts of it. So when I got my Jolla, I started playing with SDK and writing some simple applications. It was kinda harder than I expected, but I’ll write about there in separate blog post. This one is dedicated to the applications I wrote and to show what do they do. And if you have a Jolla, maybe get you interested in those 😉 Both of them are available via OpenRepos and Harbour.