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2025

Crafting Your Software

·3191 words·15 mins

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 Debcrafters

·1120 words·6 mins
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.

From NixOS to Ubuntu

·3081 words·15 mins
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.

Adopting sudo-rs By Default in Ubuntu 25.10

·1173 words·6 mins
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.

Revitalising Ubuntu Project Documentation

·1294 words·7 mins
An article outlining my plan to revamp Ubuntu’s ‘project documentation’, illuminating the path for new contributors and enabling better distributed decision making.

Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu

·1619 words·8 mins
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.

Own Your Calendar

·2424 words·12 mins

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.

Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years

·2019 words·10 mins
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.

Packaging the Multipass Flutter GUI for NixOS

·1599 words·8 mins
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.

2024

Experimenting with Rust, Nix, K6 and Parca

·6266 words·30 mins
A post outlining my journey into Rust, and how I reimplemented the server that powers this very website in Rust, then benchmarked both the old and new implementation with K6, investigated a performance issue with Parca and then automated the whole lot using Nix!

Hot Tub Monitoring with Home Assistant and ESPHome

·2126 words·10 mins
A short blog post explaining how I replaced a proprietary wireless temperature monitor for my hot tub, with a simple ESP32 based micro-controller and a cheap bluetooth pool thermometer, all linked up with Home Assistant.

Writing a Home Assistant Core Integration: Part 2

·3053 words·15 mins

Part 2 of a micro-series of blog posts that outlines my journey toward authoring a Home Assistant Core integration for the Roth Touchline SL heating system.

This post covers the actual build and upstream contribution of the Home Assistant Core integration.

Writing a Home Assistant Core Integration: Part 1

·3468 words·17 mins

Part 1 of a micro-series of blog posts that outlines my journey toward authoring a Home Assistant Core integration for the Roth Touchline SL heating system.

This first post covers the design and build of a Python API client for Roth’s upstream API that controls the underfloor heating systems.

Libations: Tailscale on the Rocks

·2567 words·13 mins
A deep dive into my home grown cocktail recipe app which speaks Tailscale natively using tsnet, and serves up delicious drinks direct to your tailnet. Libations is built with Go, Nix and Vanilla Framework.