Those working remotely or managing a distributed team know it: face time is invaluable. The former openSUSE team has been using http://sqwiggle.com to keep in touch and Google hangout to hold a stand up meeting every morning. We like the Sqwiggle approach. Although the last updates have made it worse, the concept of having a peep to your colleagues' desks to know if they are there (even if they are working hard or just talking to someone) and the possibility of starting a video conversation just clicking on the face shot can do a lot in reducing distances (and in killing the temptation of working naked for home-officers).

Yast team has a great experience in automating tasks that can be done by machines in order to save time that can be used better. We usually use Jenkins for running these jobs.

Why to use automation?

During the YCP Killer project, Y2R didn't translate most YCP operators and builtins into equivalent Ruby constructs but into library calls. This was necessary to preserve behavior in various edge-case situations, mostly when nil was passed around. The resulting code is often long and hard to work with. Example from SlideShow.rb:

YaST code organization is a mess at many levels (files location, namespaces, code dependencies...). Recently we created this gist to put some of the issues on the table Many YaST developers will be at openSUSE Conference, that overlaps with Hackweek. The plan is to lock them all in a room with a blackboard and reach agreements on how the code should be organized in the future. Then use Hackweek to iron the details, document everything in some kind of style guide and, if time permits, even do some experiments about how to adapt the existing code to the new conventions.

Right now, every time a new team wants a new room in our Jangouts instance, they have to ping me and I have to manually create the room. That means: * Adding some lines to the corresponding config file

The current Jangouts UI is limiting us when thinking about adding new features. Some examples: * This (using the whole thumbnail to pin a participant) was implemented, but the result is far from optimal (I have not even deployed it in production).

I want to make ruby-lint usable. ruby-lint, as described by its author:

Unfortunately there is no UI designer or editor for YaST dialogs. All dialogs are hand crafted in Ruby code. The idea of this project is to provide some way how to create or edit the existing dialogs in a user friendly way, without touching any code.

Installation time is important as shorter installation allows everyone to safe resources and their time. It also can make better impression when starting with openSUSE and SUSE. And last but not least as we more frequently use openQA, so we do hundreds of installation every week, it even smaller improvement can in the end help SUSE to safe resources and be more green. Result of Project

Orcas are amazing animals. They are playful, intelligent, great swimmers, and very social. They also love to play with their food, hunting down their prey with advanced strategies - understanding where its prey hides, how it will try to escape, and how to overcome those tactics - and having a lot of fun doing so, before relentlessly tearing it apart, killing it, and eat it. Not necessarily in that order. Oh, and they have the right color scheme. This forces their prey to also improve and adapt more advanced strategies and tactics. In this arms race, both sides evolve and improve: the evolutionary pressure has made cephalopods highly intelligent, adaptable, and resilient. Unfortunately (for them), they are still very tasty. So we should exert more evolutionary pressure on individuals to help them stay alive as a species.

Seagate has a "new" hard disk product called Kinetic, this kind of hard disk can connect to ethernet directly and no extra computer system needed. This project is to build a Kinetic Storage Gateway, to export a legacy NAS interface to clients (TV, mobile phone, etc..) and hide kinetic protocol details behind the gateway. Currently the gateway software is running on a read hardware router, in future it could be a program running on smart TV or phone, to access the kinetic hard disk cluster without hardware gateway.

I want to learn more about SDN and NFV, so i have started reading some book ASIN: B00WF85208 and prepared a list of things to get deeper into: - SDN

Every packager encounters boring manual tasks every once in a while and these tasks can most probably be automated to some extent. During Hackweek I aim to try and identify such cases in various packagers' workflow and consider creating a tool that would make these tasks easier. Also, I would like to find out whether there is a demand for such tool. In that case, this Hackweek project will turn into a long-term task I plan to keep working on.

Geeko's Hack Week Gazette - Nürnberg Edition Provide a daily news mail what is going on during Hack Week

Make a final attempt to implement a graphical user interface for grub2 (gfxboot2).

It's quite some work, unfortunately. Here's what's done so far:

The openSUSE build service could build hundreds of packages in parallel but in practice serial package dependencies prevent that.

I have a Flipdot sign that needs control hardware/software. I believe it supports RS485. * Get it to display anything at all

Experiment with kite aerial photography * Build or buy kite?

Experiment with kite aerial photography * Build or buy kite?

Build a paper folding machine capable of folding Skill Shot. * Print run is 2500 copies

In general plan for YaST is to use ruby only in future. So goal of this project is to move it forward and replace more parts with ruby. Current ideas is to replace binary y2base with ruby script, which allows easier integration with ruby tools and more important it solve some issues with embedding ruby, as it will be then first citizen.

yast2-storage-ng is a reimplementation of the YaST storage module (yast2-storage) based on the also reimplemented library for storage manager

Learn about developing a YaST plugin by creating a plugin to manage SSH Tunnels. Creating SSH port tunnels along with corresponding iptables rules is a useful technique for being able to access virtual machines on a remote host that only visible on a private network. Managing and maintaining these connections via scripts and tmux sesssions is less desirable than doing it through a nice UI like YaST. Note that the CLI tool https://www.npmjs.com/package/ssh-tunnel-manager has some nice ideas for managing groups and profiles that may be useful.

This project is about fixing this known Jangouts issue that is reported over and over, since many user experiencing problem with the outgoing WebRTC traffic or with camera authorization can "lurk" what happens in the room without being noticed. Copy&Paste from the last comment there: It's true there is a lot of room for improvements to raise the awareness about "lurkers". For example, we could compare the number of people subscribed to your stream and the number of publishers. If numbers do not match, there is somebody listening but not being displayed. That's something we could show in the UI.

Currently we use openQA for the the YaST integration tests. It runs YaST in a VM and controls it via emulating keyboard input. The result is checked by comparing the screenshots. This approach has several disadvantages:

Using docker as a development platform for nontrivial development environments sounds interesting. This project is about learning basic docker handling, about exploring how to use it for simplifying development, and maybe (but just maybe) about providing ready-made docker containers for new team members.

Perl-apparmor is obsolete in the apparmor community. No one is maintaining it. However, opensuse has to keep it to interact with yast, which is the main consumer of perl-apparmor. Getting rid of perl-apparmor would mean: + Creating a new interface (JSON) to interact with outside world (IOW, yast)