Senior design is shaping up just as bad as everyone said it would be.

Update February 2017: This program is wierd, how did we get our project approved?

Update March 2017: I’ve heard of software scope creep, but never this bad.

Update April 2017: Finally a build freeze and bugfix window.

Update May 2017: Finally done; I would not wish this class or experience on my worst enemies. I have worked on large design projects in the past and this was not representative of any of them. This was representative of what happens when someone tries to squash all of the normal complexity of running a complete product development pipeline into a class and then dumb it down to the point that people who’ve had no exposure to running a project on a deadline can finish it. This has been one of the bigger wastes of time for me.

Twas the night before christmas and not a creature was stirring save an infrastructure engineer.

The rest of my family has gone to sleep, the tree is nicely lit and tomorrow will come early. But we’re burning SLO and the contract will expire for Void’s current build machine on the 31st of December. I’m capturing all the state with Ansible to stand up the new build server on the 26th so that it will be ready to go in the next few days.

Its the start of December. I’m pretty much finished with finals and projects for this semester. Because of the stuff for the next semester this largely represents the end of my undergraduate career. Its been a long time gettings here and I wouldn’t be here without the help of many people.

Looking back at this semester has had some incredible things:

In September the LUG started up in earnest and I worked to get the office up and running as a functional space. There are rumors we may lose that space but until these are confirmed its going to be a functional office.

As I imagined getting Void into the T100TA would not be easy. It required custom install media and lots of fuss to get it to boot and then even more to install. Right now this just isn’t ready for prime time, the wifi doesn’t even work!

Update January 2017: Wifi works out of the box now

Update March 2017: Void supports hybrid boot, its possible to run x64 kernels now

Its a late night tonight as I setup the honors network for a smooth start one last time. Its been a long summer to make a clean startup on Void after migrating off of Ubuntu. Here’s what’s happened.

So Ubuntu is a fine platform and I still would probably recommend it for new Linux users. It worked well for setting up the platform and was a decent system for a long time. Where it fell short was in the usability from an administrative perspective. The packages are ancient, the fact that things are linked against gnutls is a real pain and the community doesn’t have great docs for running Ubuntu in the enterprise. Overall it was time to move on.