c-space.org

It has been a looong time, but it was worth every minute: I'm starting at Google in Zürich in September! I was hired as a senior software engineer in site reliability engineering.

The interview process was pretty standard, with an initial contact by a recruiter, a first phone call with the recruiter, a second phone call with a recruiter from the target location, a technical phone interview and an on-site marathon^Wtechnical interview. My experience has been very similar to what others have written about it, so I won't go into details here. The technical interviews were very reasonable, with interesting questions from smart people. The only negative I can find was the long time it took, about 10 weeks from initial contact to offer. The recruiter had told me it would take 4 - 6 weeks, I guess he was a bit optimistic.

I'll be moving to Zürich at the end of August, and start the new job on September 5th. I can't wait to be there!

(more details coming soon :)

After a bit over two years of development, Trac 0.12 finally has been released today. This is a new major release, containing many enhancements, new features and bug fixes. The most notable enhancements are the following:

• Internationalization support and interface localization: The interface can now be translated, and displayed in the language chosen by each user. We currently have 17 complete translations and three more above 80%. Our translators have done a great job in the last weeks, keeping their translations up-to-date while we were polishing the messages. Kudos to you all!
• Multiple repositories per instance: It is now possible to associate more than one repository with a Trac instance. This fits pretty well with the current DVCS trend, where the number of repositories often grows pretty quickly.
• Improved ticket queries: It is now possible to query tickets by their creation and last modification date, using open or close date ranges. Moreover, queries can now contain OR clauses, e.g. to get the list of tickets you own or where you are on CC.
• Automatic preview of wiki formatting: The wiki page and ticket comment editors now show an automatic preview of the wiki text as you type. For the wiki page editor, this happens in side-by-side mode, where the left column contains the editable text, and the right column shows the live preview. Having used the feature for some time now, I can say that this is a huge productivity boost.
• Improved ticket editing: In addition to the live comment preview, the ticket editor now allows editing comments, while retaining the full comment history. Moreover, an optional component allows deleting ticket comments or complete tickets, a very useful feature for spam management.

In total, 0.12 represents 346 closed tickets (at the time of this writing), split into 132 enhancements, 213 defects and one task.

Trac 0.11.7 has been released today. It contains one security fix and a few bug fixes and performance improvements.

• Fixed a missing ticket field validation that allowed unauthorized users to change the status and resolution of tickets.
• Improved the performance of full-text search.
• Fixed configuration file saving on Windows.

I know I've written this before, but this is really going to be the last release in the 0.11.x series.

The first 0.12 beta should be pretty close, with (currently) 14 remaining issues. t.e.o has been running trunk for quite some time, and it's been really stable. I have upgraded my own Trac instances recently, and I wouldn't want to go back! The multi-repository support is especially great, and I have been able to consolidate my Subversion repository and all my Mercurial repositories in a single Trac instance. Automatic preview of ticket comments and wiki pages (the latter with side-by-side display) are also extremely useful. Needless to say, I can't wait to release 0.12 for good!

Trac 0.11.6 has been released today. It contains two security fixes, a number of performance improvements and lots of bug fixes.

• Database connection pooling has been re-enabled for SQLite. This requires recent versions of both SQLite and PySQLite, so you may want to update those as well. In particular, the sqlite3 module bundeled with Python 2.6.4 is not sufficient.
• This release formally deprecates SQLite 2.x and PySQLite 1.x support, and it will be removed altogether in 0.12.
• Handling of timezones with DST has been fixed. In particular, it should now be possible to close milestones with an immediate completion time even when DST is active.

Only a single release candidate was done this time, despite a few minor issues popping up during testing. We are pretty confident that the fixes were correct, and we didn't want to delay the release any further, so that we could focus on 0.12.

This is likely to be the last release of the 0.11.x series. The focus of development is now on 0.12, which should be released by the end of the year, possibly early January. MultiRepos, here we come!

Today I'm celebrating my first anniversary of Trac development, and that year has been awesome. I have had the opportunity to work with great minds and very competent users, and in general to benefit from the great community that Trac has built (including making a fool of myself). Yeah, right, so English is not my native tongue. Sue me.

Trac 0.11.5 has been released today. This is a maintenance release from the stable branch, featuring many bug fixes but also a few very nice enhancements:

• svn:mergeinfo and svnmerge-integrated / svnmerge-blocked properties are now interpreted and rendered as links to the revision log. This makes Trac a very nice graphical frontend for svn mergeinfo, that is, for displaying merged and eligible changesets on a branch.
• User feedback has been improved by allowing notices and warnings to be displayed after POST operations, typically after submitting a form. This allows, for example, displaying the message "Your preferences have been saved." in the user preferences, instead of simply going back to the same page.
• Links to attachments now have a small icon next to them that allows downloading the file directly, without going through the attachment page.
• PostgreSQL and MySQL databases can now be backed up during upgrades, so the --no-backup option for trac-admin $ENV upgrade is not needed anymore.

Once again, the release process has worked very well, allowing to fix a few last-minute issues while the two release candidates were available for testing.

A new stable release of Trac has been released today as 0.11.4. It features fixes for a few regressions that slipped into 0.11.3, most notably for the PostgreSQL database backend and for Python 2.3, and a Python 2.6 compatibility fix.

The release candidates were a real improvement, as they allowed us to catch a regression that, quite ironically, made the "New Ticket" link on trac.edgewall.org non-functional. Also, having the release candidates out there for a few days gave us more confidence that we wouldn't have an issue pop up a few hours after the release (I'm crossing fingers that this doesn't happen anyway :-). A big thank you to those who tested the release candidates.

If you would like to help improve our releases by testing future release candidates, don't hesitate to register here, especially if you have a somewhat exotic configuration. You will be notified as soon as a new release candidate is available.

Trac 0.11.3 has been released today. It is a new stable maintenance release, and contains a few minor enhancements, as well as many bugfixes. The most notable changes are:

• Python 2.6 compatibility
• Custom text fields can be configured to use wiki formatting

Ton départ subit laisse dans nos coeurs un vide douloureux.

Tu vas nous manquer.