This week: Design Thinking Training part 2, The Kairos Ubuntu 25.10 Saga Continues, KCD UK & Porto
Design Thinking Training part 2#
Since design thinking is user-centric, I thought the best way to implement some of it for Kairos is to get more feedback from users. IMO, right now users mostly come to us if they have already committed to using Kairos and get blocked. As soon as we help them with that roadblock, we don’t hear much from them. This is partly understandable: there are so many open-source projects one needs to use on a daily basis; I wouldn’t expect users to be engaged in all of them. But it is also problematic because we miss very important feedback, and it falls short of what I’d call a community. This is why I think the first step is to get more people to share their thoughts on Kairos through a simple survey accessible via our web and CLI interfaces. kairos-io/kairos#3668
Kairos Ubuntu 25.10#
I spent a lot of time fighting with this. To simplify my life, I released versions of the different components and picked them in my branch. This fixed the space issues on the CI runners, but to my surprise I started seeing errors with the encryption tests. Since part of the fix I introduced touched cryptsetup, I assumed it was a genuine failure and went to test manually, but couldn’t reproduce. After so much fighting with it, I finally decided to run the tests locally and realized, to my surprise, that they were all passing. It was all CI issues, and just switching to use our runners fixed it (thanks Itxaka for suggesting that).
People keep saying the joke “it runs on my machine”. This week I even saw a post about how saying something like that could get you fired in some companies. But hey, it turns out this can sometimes be a real case, and the problem is not the dev’s way of thinking but how our infrastructure (in general, not Kairos specifically) is not 100% interchangeable. We should keep pushing to build software so it’s reproducible in as many environments as possible, but we should avoid throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In my case, it means doing some tweaks in the Kairos repo to make running tests locally a bit easier—because let’s face it, letting CI do it is so easy—and as an industry, it means identifying when it’s not just a case of bad practices that someone’s code only “runs on their machine”.
KCD UK & Porto#
I have my flights and hotels for KCD UK and KCD Porto. I’ve added the details to my events page. I’ll be sharing the stage with William Rizzo and will be talking about immutable edge platforms. I’m very much looking forward to meeting the communities there and keep sharing about the greatnesses of immutability and Kairos!
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