Marcin Juszkiewicz - company

Twelve years of remote work

2019-02-06T14:24:00+01:00

Twelve years ago I stopped writing PHP code at work. And moved to paid embedded consultant role. Remote paid embedded consultant role even. And never moved to office since. Companies paying for my work were changing, flats/cities were changing, desks too.

People ask me how it is to work remote at each conference I attend. Often say that they could not work because of a company they work for or because they do not feel that it would fit them. Usually it comes to distractions, being at home etc.

So what you may need for remote work? It can differ. For me there are several requirements:

task oriented job
desk
comfortable chair
good monitor(s)
input devices
quiet environment
coffee machine access

Job requirements

First of all being remotee does not work when company does not allow to be out of office whole time. All those offers with “we allow one day per week to be remote” are a joke. It shows that company tries to follow trend but is not ready for it yet. In such cases most of the discussions are during physical meetings (so without remotees).

Work hours

Other thing is work hours. The first company I did remote work for was OpenedHand from UK. We had three time zones in use every day: UK, Europe, Finland. Which mean that if I start work between 8:00 and 10:00 then it is fine. But that is also common in non-remote work too. There I usually kept same/similar work hours that office guys did.

When I moved to work for other foreign companies (Red Hat Polska sp. z o.o. is Polish company but we can ignore that here) time difference usually got added.

Task oriented job

Time zone differences mean you can not keep same work hours as office. This is where task oriented job starts. You need to know what you have to do and when deadline is. And do that in time which fits you best.

This allows to take your child to a doctor or cinema during office work hours and spend other part of day on tasks.

If you bill by hours then some tool to mark hours/quarters you worked for customer is good to have.

With such kind of work come reports. Depends on company it can be weekly emails, jira cards, bugtracker issues etc.

I remember working for Vernier company where we had nine hours time difference. First we spent few hours on discussions what we need to do, how we split work into tasks. Then each day started with mail, ‘git svn pull’, changes, builds, commits, rebases and at the end of my day ‘git svn dcommit’. And email with list of done things, what needs work on their side, patches for review and plans for next day. This gave us 16 hours long developer days.

Free days

Depends on your contract you may or may not have days off available. If you have tasks to do then you can travel and work at your destination, right? I often took my daughter to my mother in a way that they were going to a beach or something while I was working.

Self discipline

This is where many of people give up. Not being in an office means you can do whatever because no one will notice, right? Yes and no at same time.

Wasting time

From one side it helps you waste time on whatever you want. But once you start piling not done work someone will notice. And you may have discussion with manager or lose contract.

When I worked on OpenEmbedded it was often “do some changes and have few hours of time due to build taking place”. Upgrading machine helped (or having remote access to powerful builders). Now my builds do not take so much time :D

This was also a time when to learn something, clean a flat, do laundry or even watch some TV series episode.

Health

Make sure that you have proper desk and chair. Read safety regulations and choose wisely.

Select good input devices. I use Microsoft Ergonomic Desktop 4000 keyboard and A4Tech Bloody ZL5 Sniper mouse. Huge mousepad helps (I use 35x45cm one).

Go for two/three monitors (same model if possible). Or one ultrawide (3440x1440 is nice). Mount them on arm to have space under them available.

RSI and other issues

Repetitive strain injury is something I would not wish even to enemies. Here is where combination of desk/chair/keyboard/mouse helps.

Do breaks during work — I use RSIbreak application to force me to do them. 20 seconds every ten minutes and 60 seconds every hour. Enough to look at something other than display (short ones) or walk a bit (make coffee, grab a fruit).

If you feel pain in your back do something about it. Massage helps. Pay a specialist to do it. And then repeat from time to time.

Check your sight yearly if glasses/lenses or bi-yearly if not.

Would I go back to an office?

No. Got used to work in environment that I control. Where I can choose if I want silence or some music. Where I meet other people when/if needed.

From sprint experiences I know that two-three days of work with some other folks exhausts me. Then I required headphones for the rest of week and a place to sit and work without interruptions.

My own company started 8th year today

2013-09-09T19:29:00+02:00

Seven years ago I created my one person company. And it was one of best things I did in my life.

All started in 2006 when I started doing some small paid jobs around OpenEmbedded. Small things: solving build problems, updating recipes, adding new ones. But companies prefer to get invoice for such stuff instead of just giving money…

So one day I went to city hall and created what was then called “HaeRWu Marcin Juszkiewicz”. I changed name 2 years later and got rid of that ‘impossible to pronouce’ part.

There were many different clients for my consulting work. CELF was my first one, later I dropped my daily work and started remote work for OpenedHand. When they were acquired by Intel I got quite nice offer but preferred not to move to UK so went own way. From time perspective I do not know was it right decision ;)

So I looked at market around OpenEmbedded and started working with Bug Labs and few smaller jobs for other clients (some knew me from OpenedHand times). Also had job proposal from Canonical for their newly created ARM team but nothing came from it.

Time passed. One and half-year later Canonical made another attempt and this time I though “why not?”. So I went there just to be moved outside to a team which did not have any official name (other than NewCo or New Core which you may heard somewhere). And that team became Linaro some days later.

At Linaro I did lot of cleanup in Debian/Ubuntu toolchain components, added bootstrapable cross toolchain and fixed several packages (also created some new ones). But then, just when I was supposed to move to Canonical, new things came and AArch64 took my whole time.

ARMv8 work was great time. Learnt new things about OpenEmbedded, saw how project moved during those two years when I did not follow it’s development. Och it was good time.

But good things have to end one day. And so did my time at Linaro. But at around same time I started talking with several companies around Linaro to find a new place for me.

And I found it at Red Hat. Took a bit of time to get everything set up but I think that it was worth it. But due to the fact that I am employee not contractor I will suspend and in few months shutdown my consulting company.

It served me well. I came from being person not recognizable to someone who is known by people who I see for first time. It is good feeling ;)

On my own again

2013-07-04T07:36:00+02:00

After 3 years at Linaro I have decided to not continue my trip with Canonical. So now I am back to be on my own again.

I will not write why I made such decision but also want to mention that time at Canonical/Linaro was good. I learnt some new tools and added some of them to “avoid if possible” list. From products created and developed at Canonical there are Bazaar and Unity. Both have replacements which I like more.

What next? Will see — I had some meetings and discussions. But I am open for job offers of course ;) It can be Debian or OpenEmbedded or Ubuntu or other ARM Linux related as long I do not have to move.

Looks like it is time for me to say good bye again

2013-05-06T23:12:00+02:00

Good things have one ugly part in common — they have to end one day… For me that day will be 31st May 2013 when contract between Canonical and Linaro will end.

Those 3 years were great. I wrote a lot about it half year ago so those of you who are new - go to my previous “good bye Linaro” post before reading rest of this post.

Half year ago I was going to Canonical but got hold at Linaro for longer. Then I made a mistake by agreeing to postpone my move to Linaro instead of joining as soon as possible — my fault…

Last 6 months were full of interesting things. We went from just bootstrapped AArch64 port to fully working LAMP and SDK images built with OpenEmbedded. I integrated all Linaro layers into one repository and reorganized in a way that those who want only our toolchains can have them without using any of our changes. This move was greeted by lot of maintainers and users from OpenEmbedded community. Wherever new toolchain components were provided for tests I had them checked on first day to see how AArch64 situation got improved and provided fixes when they were needed.

Recent release of Yocto Project has several changes done by me and Riku Voipio integrated. OpenEmbedded project also made release and has even more our changes in it. Most of those were AArch64 related, some were software updates or fixes to low level stuff.

Linaro Enterprise Group has Owen Yamauchi from Facebook working on porting HipHopVM. He is using SDK created by OpenEmbedded to not worry about any build dependencies or missing libraries. With my work (and work from porters like Riku Voipio, Steve McIntyre, Yvan Roux and others) he got not only libraries but also tools he needed for his job.

Andy Johnson started OpenJDK porting — also with OpenEmbedded. Riku provided instructions which I merged into our ‘jenkins-setup’ scripts to make live easier for Andy.

Due to all that work I am often contacted by random people (not only from Linaro) wherever they have some AArch64 related questions. Sometimes even with ARMv4/EABI related like post from Nicolas Pitre a day after RMK wrote that FPU emulator has to be removed from the Linux kernel. I provided him instructions how to make such build and just to be sure that I did not made any mistakes I tried one on my machine. IIRC none of main distributions support EABI for ARMv4 (no thumb) processors.

But looks like all that has to end. Unless someone from Linaro member companies (or who knows, maybe even Linaro itself) wants to hire me. I am open for offers.

If I go outside of @linaro.org then I would like to stay around and check how things go — probably as ‘community member’ or how it is called.

And one more thing at the end. As usual when I end my work at one place I gather recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have few spare minutes and want to write something then it will be appreciated.

3 years at Canonical

2013-04-26T09:33:00+02:00

Today I can celebrate 3 years of working for Canonical.

First days

I was supposed to start from 1st May but as I had vacations already planned for that week (in Poland 1st and 3rd May are national holidays) they asked me to start work one week earlier — on 26th April 2010.

First week was usual learning about company rules, structure, reading wiki etc. Then I went for vacations and right after I was going for UDS-M (somewhere around Brussels, Belgium) where I met a team of people of unnamed project. Some days after event that team got a name: Linaro.

Linaro Developer Platform

I am a member of Developer Platform from beginning. Our team was changing, we got more people than we lost some as they moved to newly created teams and we had few renames. First it was Foundations (like Ubuntu Foundations at Canonical), then Developer Platform, then just Platform. Now we are ~~Bold & Beautiful~~Builds and Baselines.

We work on delivering components done by other teams (like ARM and AArch64 cross toolchains, Linux kernel), provide test images created from Ubuntu packages or built with OpenEmbedded (soon also Fedora).

Since September 2012 I am working on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) bring-up with use of OpenEmbedded (as at that time none of distributions had anything working to base on). Updated toolchain, fixed many issues with different software packages, patched some applications/libraries. Cooperated with few teams at Linaro and with several upstream projects.

Canonical or Linaro?

As some people remember there was a moment last year when I was supposed to leave Linaro and go to Canonical. But someone decided to keep me for longer…

But such things does not last forever. At the end of May I will probably end my journey at Linaro cause contract for Canonical’s engineers will end. Unless someone wants to keep me for longer…

Nine years of embedded Linux

2013-02-11T10:45:00+01:00

Nine years ago I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 as my first Linux PDA. And due to this I am where I am.

I could say that it started two years earlier when I saw PalmOS devices at local geek meetings. But it took me over year before Palm m105… Then was Sony Clie SJ30 — gorgeous device. High resolution, memory card, 16bit colour. Too bad that applications did not make use of it.

So I went for Linux. There were two options: Zaurus or iPaq. Went for former one as it had keyboard. It was good choice.

Quickly started development of packages and joined OpenEmbedded team. Then became one of OpenZaurus developers. After year or something took over release maintenance and released few last versions. 3.5.4(.1) were the best tested releases of OZ ever — I had over hundred testers for each RC image and they provided installation reports, bug reports and fixes. And it had unified installer for whole range of devices (took me several months to get it polished and few guys added own tweaks). When Ångström distribution started I was the one who officially ended OpenZaurus development.

And all that was in free time. But in mean time I created my consulting company. CELF was my first customer ;)

One nice evening I got question on irc and due to that I left dark side of IT and went from PHP programming to embedded Linux full-time. OpenedHand had interesting projects and clients with many devices. Imagine operating system + kernel + Python + GStreamer in 16 megabytes of flash… And I managed to get it done. While working for them I used proper developer boards (not only customer devices) and there were funny moments…

When we worked with ST Microelectronics on NDK-15 (later replaced by NHK-15 from ST Ericsson) I had to merge two kernel trees from two separate teams. Took me 2 days of mangling 20-30MB diffs but got it done. There are people at ST-E which reminded me this during one of Linaro Connects ;D

Also on GUADEC 2007 when we presented new interface for Openmoko phones NDK-15 had to wait for me as no one at stand was able to get it running (U-Boot config needed changes).

But then Intel acquired OpenedHand… The craziest trip of my life was return from London to my parents place. For three months I even had @linux.intel.com email but never used it due to problems with Intel corporate network and Linux (do not ask).

Next was Bug Labs and their BUG device. I cleaned their Poky trees, migrated to latest version and later to use OpenEmbedded directly. Less challenges but I also had few other customers at that time to keep me busy. Some of them were OH customers before and went to me for help.

Time passed, 2010 came. One day Canonical made another attempt to seduce me and this time I decided that it looks like good opportunity so I accepted. Sent BUG 2.0 prototype back to NYC and few weeks later I made crazy train trip to small nowhere near Brussels to meet my new coworkers from NewCore. 1-2 weeks later we got our current name: Linaro.

Total change… From embedded devices to ‘Yes, it is ARM. So what?’ kind as we support(ed) devices powerful enough to run normal desktop software. Many changes for me — from OpenEmbedded where you can (cross) build everything in few hours to Ubuntu packaging where sending package for inclusion into archive meant few hours of buildd queue and then few of build. But I learnt a lot here and met another set of hackers including grey beards ones ;)

And all that because I bought Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 nine years ago…

So long, and thanks for all the fish

2012-10-26T09:10:00+02:00

Today is 2.5 year of my work at Linaro. It was very good time. But good things have one thing in common — they end at some moment. For me that moment will be 30th November — after that I will be working at Canonical.

For me it will be like starting new job because they hired me to work at Linaro so I never really worked “at” Canonical — always “for”. Hope that it will be at least as interesting as Linaro work was.

When I think about all those 30 months few things came to my mind. First one is people. Linaro gathered many good engineers (and non-engineers as well) and it has many stars as well.

For example: Nicolas Pitre. I had big respect for him since I started work on embedded Linux. But until sprint in Prague, July 2010 I did not realise that he is blind… We went for some beers, chatted about things we did at previous jobs, spent good time (and I managed to not fail too much as a guide).

Other example: Few days ago Arnd wrote on Google+ about mold problem which forced him to throw some books into trash. Beside cookbooks and Discworld ones he found one written by David Rusling (CTO of Linaro)… It is hard to check Linux history and not meet someone who works at Linaro.

I learnt a lot during those 30 months. Not only about toolchains, cross toolchains and toolchains (yes, ‘toolchains’ are repeated) but also on Debian/Ubuntu packaging, relations between those two projects, how to get own packages into them, how to get fixes there etc. Now I am member of Ubuntu MOTU team (can upload to ‘universe’ part of Ubuntu) and since this week also Debian Maintainer. But at same time also learnt how OpenEmbedded works today and maintained two Linaro layers for it.

AArch64 porting was/is a great project. There were some issues because it was internal only for some time when we had some internal patches which we preferred to not show to public. But that feeling when I got “hello world” compiled as one of first people outside of ARM Ltd. will always be something to remember. And now everyone can check how it works ;)

When I was at ELC/E 2011 in Prague there was a talk by Paweł Moll about running Linux on non-existing hardware. At that time it sounded like science fiction to me but later when I had to use Fast Models to boot AArch64 kernel I realised that it is not s-f.

But technical things are just one side. I enjoyed Linaro Connect meetings, chatting with people from different countries on technical and non-technical matters. It helped to improve my spoken English which I was not using so much before. I even had discussions about English itself with people like Andrew Stubbs — thanks man!

There were also funny moments. I remember when in Budapest David Rusling told me that I got unofficial title “main complainer at Linaro” due to my post about what is wrong with all those cheap developer boards we supported. We were sitting at a table during “Meet & Greet” and there was one guy sitting there. I did not saw his badge and asked him which boards he used so far. He told: Freescale Quickstart. I answered: Ah, that square one with five edges? And then I told what I like and dislike in it. We had interesting discussion and at the end I saw his badge - he was Freescale person at TSC ;)

Or visit in Computer History Museum. Man, I should follow Paul McKinney there — he recognized probably most of the devices there and know what they are for. We had interesting talk about it next evening in a bus.

So, there are few weeks of Linaro work for me. During this week I am be in Copenhagen at Canonical’s Summit where I met my next team to find out what exactly I will be working on. Then we have Linaro Connect co-hosted with Ubuntu Developer Summit. It will be a strange week for me. Will attend ARMv8 Summit sessions due to work I did in last weeks but other sessions? For sure will attend some, both Linaro and Ubuntu ones but this time not as much as on previous summits. If you need me on you session then add me to the list of attendees or contact me.

Week after LC/UDS I will spend in Spain. There is Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Barcelona where I will have a talk about AArch64 support in OpenEmbedded. There will be also similar session by Wookey about ARMv8 in Debian — check LinuxCon Europe schedule for it.

But Barcelona is also OpenEmbedded related for me. There will be General Assembly of OE e.V. and then Yocto Project Developer’s Day where I plan to discuss with OE developers about merging AArch64 support.

Then few days of holidays at warm country, visit Zygmunt and go back home for another 2-3 weeks of Linaro work.

So lot of work to do. Need to take a look at what exactly I did during those 30 months, which parts of it will need new maintainer, write some notes/documentation for it, check PPAs for things which may need updating etc. So far I did not yet decided will I maintain cross compiler packages in 13.04 and later releases of Ubuntu or not. For sure I will do that to android-tools which are now part of Debian.

But is it end of my Linaro journey? I hope not. Time will show will I stay at Canonical. Today it is hard to tell because there are interesting projects there as well. But I do not want to end my Linaro adventure.

And one more thing. As usual when I end my work at one place I gather recommendations on LinkedIn. If you have few spare minutes and want to write something then it will be appreciated: my LinkedIn profile.

Another job change

2010-04-06T18:07:00+02:00

Since OpenedHand was acquired by Intel I worked with few customers. The biggest one was Bug Labs Inc. with which I spend lot of time on hacking Poky Linux and OpenEmbedded to make their BUG devices prosper in hacking community.

Thanks to developers there Java land is not so strange for me (not that I started to like it) and I know which projects exist in that area. Many of changes done for BUG landed in OpenEmbedded metadata and helped other projects. Last release of Poky ‘pinky’ (stable branch which we used with R1.4) was done due to out improvements and bug fixes (we got credit on them). It was great time and I really enjoyed it.

The open source companies have this nice feeling — developers work on code to make it better and better (as other people look at code) and are friendly to own employees and contractors.

What next? My first job where my experience from OpenEmbedded will be used in a project which does not derive from it. Yes — no OpenEmbedded, no Poky Linux. But it will be GNU/Linux still and still ARM architecture.

In 3 weeks from now I will work for Canonical as Foundations OS Engineer. The goal is to make Ubuntu/ARM fly on supported devices (armv7a only). This will be full time job but I hope that will have possibility to do some OE related things from time to time.