Long ago I applied for my dream job at a company I have wanted to wok for since its beginning and I wasn t ready technically. Fast forward to now, I am ready! A big thank you goes out to Blue Systems for that. So I go out and find the perfect role and start the application process. The process was months long, but was going very well, the interviews and I passed the technical with flying colors. I got to the end where the hiring lead told me he was submitting my offer I was so excited, so much so, I told my husband and parents I got the job! I know, I jinxed myself there. Soon I receive the There was a problem .. One obscure assessment called GIA came back not so good. I remember that day, we were in the middle of a long series of winter storms and I when I took the test, my kitten decided right then it was me time. I couldn t very well throw her out into the snowstorm, so I continued on the best I could. It is my fault, it clearly states to be distraction free. So I speak again to the hiring lead and we both feel with my experience and technical knowledge and abilities we can still move forward. I still had hope. After some time passes, I asked for an update and got the dreaded rejection. I am told it wasn t just the GIA, but that I am not a good overall fit for the company. In one fell swoop my dreams are dashed and final, for this and all roles within that company. I wasn t given a reason either. I am devastated, heart broken, and shocked. I get along with everyone, I exceed the technical requirements, and I work well in the community. Dream door closed. I will not let this get me down. I am moving on. I will find my place where I fit in . With that said, I no longer have the will, passion, or drive to work on snaps anymore. I will leave instructions with Jonathon as to what needs to be done to move forward. The good news is my core22 kde-neon extension was merged into upstream snapcraft, so whomever takes over will have a much easier time knocking them out. @kubuntu-council I will do whatever it takes to pay back the money for the hardware you provided me to do snaps, I am truly sorry about this. What does my future hold? I will still continue with my Debian efforts. In fact, I have ventured out from the KDE umbrella and joined the go-team. I am finalizing my packaging for https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum and it s dependencies: roff, mango, mango-kong. I had my first golang patch for a failing test and have submitted it upstream. I will upload these to experimental while the freeze is on. I will be moving all the libraries in the mycroft team to the python umbrella as they are useful for other things and mycroft is no more. During the holidays I was tinkering around with selenium UI testing and stumbled on some accessibility issues within KDE, so I think this is a good place for me to dive into for my KDE contributions. I have been approached to collaborate with OpenOS on a few things, time permitting I will see what I can do there. I have a possible gig to do some websites, while I move forward in my job hunt. I will not give up! I will find my place where I fit in . Meanwhile, I must ask for donations to get us by. Anything helps, thank you for your consideration. https://gofund.me/a9c36b87

First, I would like to send a big Thank you! to Canonical for sponsoring my trip to Prague for the Ubuntu Summit! It was a great success. I saw some great talks and valuable workshops. I now know how to snap our applications the have daemons and services thanks to the Snapping Daemons and Services workshop. Prague itself is an amazing city. Wow. Just wow. I got to see old friends and meet many new ones. I will take away some wonderful memories. Did I mention a river cruise? Yes! It was great fun. I did a lightning talk with Jonathon and a Snapping Desktop Applications workshop with Olivier. The talk was lightning fast! But good practice for my speech giving skills ( a challenge for a shy person such as myself!) The workshop was great presentations of different ways snaps are done for different projects. The audience was smaller than I had hoped ( it was the end of the summit and many folks were wrapping up to leave.) I still left with a feeling of accomplishment.

Snapping Desktop Applications Workshop @ Ubuntu Summit

This week I will apply my new found knowledge and push out some more snaps!

I spent yesterday at the very enjoyable Big Data Summit held at the University of Illinois Research Park at the edge of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. campus. My (short) presentation was part of a panel session on R and Big Data which Doug Simpson of the UIUC Statistics department had put together very well. We heard from a vendor / technology provider with Christopher Nguyen from Adatao talking about their "Big R", from industry with Andy Stevens talking about a number of some real-life challenges with big data at John Deere, from academia with Jonathon Greenberg talking about R and HPC for geospatial research and I added a few short comments and links about R, HPC and Rcpp. My few slides are now up on my talks / presentations page. Overall, a good day with a number of interesting presentations and of course a number of engaging hallway discussions.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Jonathon, maybe if you wrote a song about your thoughts, you wouldn’t forget them as easily? Why is it all the sites that I visit when looking for lyrics and tab are 90% (flash and other annoying) ads?