Like all good blog posts, this one starts with an apology about not blogging for ages – in my case it looks like it’s been about 7 years which is definitely a new personal best (perhaps the equally or more remarkable thing is that I have diligently kept WordPress running in the meantime). In that time, as you might expect, a few things have happened, like I met a wonderful woman and fell in love and we have two wonderful children. I also decided to part ways with my “first baby” and leave my role as CTO & co-founder of Collabora. This was obviously a very tough decision – it’s a fantastic team where I met and made many life-long friends, and they are still going strong and doing awesome things with Open Source. However, shortly after that, in February last year, I was lucky enough to land what is basically a dream job working at Endless Computers as the VP of Deployment.

As I’m sure most readers know, Endless is building an OS to bring personal computing to millions of new users across the world. It’s based on Free Software like GNOME, Debian, ostree and Flatpak, and the more successful Endless is, the more people who get access to education, technology and opportunity – and the more FOSS users and developers there will be in the world. But in my role, I get to help define the product, understand our users and how technology might help them, take Open Source out to new people, solve commercial problems to get Endless OS out into the world, manage a fantastic team and work with bright people, learn from great managers and mentors, and still find time to squash bugs, review and write more code than I used to. Like any startup, we have a lot to do and not enough time to do it, so although there aren’t quite enough days in the week, I’m really happy!

In any case, the main point of this blog post is that I’m at GUADEC in Manchester right now, and I’d like to blog about Flathub, but I thought it would be weird to just show up and say that after 7 years of silence without saying hello again. 🙂