Note: this post reflects only my vision and not that of Savoir-faire Linux. If you want to know more about the company, please check the website.

Youhouuuu, already one year at SFL (Savoir-faire Linux)! I am thrilled and I need to write down to move on :D

It was a challenging but fruitful year for me.

Why challenging? To start with, it is my first time in a service company, where problems and challenges to deal with can vary quite frequently. Another reason is that I finished my degree in 2015 and I was not playing much with electronic boards apart from a few raspberry pi and arduino stuffs here and there. And the last, I was going to a team where I don’t know anyone. Nonetheless, I had my share of strengths and assurances to move forward: facing challenges and new problems makes me feel thriving, having knowledge in Free Software ecosystem, being a long time user of Linux based distributions, and finally two of my friends suggested the company.

Why fruitful? I have learned quite a lot in this safe space, like:

Work culture

• Ask and receive questions without prejudices.
• Accept and say no when necessary for your own and team’s health.
• Include others in problem solving, brainstorm and listen other perspectives that can bring better solutions.

Technology service sector

• Observe and feel the wind of new technologies, but take time and make smart choices on how to flow or not with it.
• Being transparent to clients is liberating.
• Participation of clients in problem solving is very important to make sure that we are solving their problems and not creating new ones.

Fedora with Plasma

• Set up correct firewall rules to make nfs server works (see the fedora project documentation here).
• Some power features of Konsole like the option --tabs-from-file which can be used to create tabs from a configuration file and even to restore sessions with some tweaks. For more details, please see this discussion in stackoverflow.

Docker

• Using docker inspect can help a lot in debugging.
• docker run has a label option through which we can pass a meta data to the container.
• Use Ctrl+P Ctrl+Q to detach from an interactive container session.

Git

• git rebase --interactive is a powerful tool, use it wisely.

SEAPATH (yocto)

If I extremely simplify this project, I would say SEAPATH is a distribution for machines in electrical substations. For more curious readers, please read the detailed description of the project here and if you want to contribute check the source code.

This is something complex and cool! My first work at SFL was a contribution to SEAPATH: make it run on a Raspberry Pi (again very simplified explanation).

My main take away from this work was to explore other ways to flash a Raspberry pi than through SDCard, it is frustrating to remove and reinsert each time!

Yocto

Apart from SEAPATH, I got an opportunity to work on SFL’s training program on Yocto. My main takeaway as a Yocto beginner was to use linux mainline kernel instead of linux-yocto kernel (I was struggling with the latter when I wanted to add a driver, and could work this out much better with the former… Thanks to my colleague for saving me there!).

SFL tools

I have participated to improve some other SFL tools too. When I am part of a community, I feel more confident while using tools from them. This is once again true with SFL. For the sake of the length of this post, I am not going to list my learnings from each of those. Here are the tools that I use:

• Jami - a private communication software
• VulnScout - vulnerability scanning and assessment tool
• CQFD - a convenient way to run commands in the current directory using a custom Docker container
• Cukinia - a test framework for Linux
• Test report PDF - a tool to generate Cukinia test report

Thanks a lot SFL

Of course I had stressful times during this year. However, the best part of working at SFL is the possibility to take time and communicate with anyone; that helps me to breath and share my difficult moments. And most of the times this communication directly fixes the causes of stress or we manage to tackle those together.

Big thanks to all of my colleagues, I am very happy to be part of this team and looking forward to many more years together!