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“I drove clear across Austin on Monday last week to meet Barton at The Domain and pick up the new…”

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“I drove clear across Austin on Monday last week to meet Barton at The Domain and pick up the new machine. Saying this sounds strange, but the experience unboxing this laptop was significantly different than any other computer I’ve ever opened. The packaging itself was elegant, even beautiful.”

– Dustin Kirkland, Project Sputnik: Developer Focused Dell XPS13

Jim Zellmer interviews me about my life | asymco

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Jim Zellmer interviews me about my life | asymco:

“They drilled that into you. They said, “This is what we’re teaching you is how to basically be a leader,” and that leadership meant being proactive, not being passive. It meant getting in, if you will, on the discussion. I got that. I got it. It made sense to me because, yeah, in the meeting, if you sit there and say nothing, probably no one pays attention to you. You won’t go anywhere in life.”

Whiteboarding the Project Sputnik Back-end

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As mentioned earlier today, we launched a new project, named Sputnik, around exploring what a developer laptop would look like, here at the day-job. Part of what we want to make is a cloud-hosted service that allows developers to quickly setup their Sputnik machine with various profiles and, as we get into, allow the overall community to contribute profiles as well.

In the video above, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide) and I talk through some thinking about what that service would be. As we emphasize, it’s just brain-storming at this point. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Project Sputnik

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Today one of the projects I’ve been working on at Dell is launching: Project Sputnik. Barton George is the one running it, while I’m just pitching in here and there. We started an internal incubation/innovation program a few months back to encourage ideas like this and Sputnik was the first project we picked.

Barton has a super-detailed post, but the upshot is: we’re exploring the idea of a developer-centric laptop starting with Ubuntu running on an XPS 13z. Canonical has been kind enough to get Unbuntu up and running on the laptop (thanks!), and now we’re doing some open innovation to explore the idea of what a developer laptop would look like.

We’ll be developing a tool-chain and a tool-driven service that lets developers layer on various pre-wired profiles, like “PHP developer,” “JavaScript developer, etc.” Ultimitly, I’d like to see us come up with an end-to-end approach that helps DevOps-minded folks out…but we’ll see where we end up! One of the participants in the program, Charles Lowell (of The FrontSide), and I recorded a white-board session going over some early thinking along these lines which I’ll post soon.

Our early reception has been great. People really like the experience of the XPS 13z, all the way from the packaging to the fast boot-up, to having a a solid developer environment.

We’re collecting input in an IdeaStorm session, and I’d love to hear any ideas you have. Also, if you want to snag the image Canonical built just for the XPS 13z, it’s available!

“When it comes to operating-system-specific details and solutions, the text exclusively describes…”

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“When it comes to operating-system-specific details and solutions, the text exclusively describes Linux. At no time will it contain any information about other OSes. The author has no interest in discussing the implications for other OSes. If the reader thinks s/he has to use a different OS they have to go to their vendors and demand they write documents similar to this one.”

– [What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1 LWN.net]