Joaquim Rocha
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ostree & Flatpak at CERN

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    Name
    Joaquim Rocha
    Twitter
  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

A week and a half ago I spent a few days in Geneva and gave a presentation about ostree and Flatpak at the CERN Computing Seminar. I started by briefly introducing Endless to give some context of the problems we’re trying to solve and how we’re using ostree and Flatpak for that, then proceeded to talk more in detail about these technologies. In the end, there were several questions, and I was happy to learn afterwards that among the audience there were some of the people working at the CVMFS project: a software distribution service to help deploy data-processing infrastructure and tools. I don’t know the full details about the project’s implementation, but from the problems they’re trying to solve it seems like ostree (or more specifically libostree) could perhaps be used to replace part of the core, which would leverage all the niceties of using a complex Open Source project (more eyeballs looking into bugs, more testing, etc.). I also think more use-cases could be found in the organization, so I hope my talk was a small seed to help introduce these projects at CERN in the medium/long term. The presentation has been recorded if you’re interested.

Getting authorization to access CERN this time was also different, as for the first time I got an entrance pass as a member of the CERN Alumni. So I would like to thank Antonella Del Rosso for the Alumni initiative and also for allowing me to kindly borrow her EU-CH power adapter when I forgot mine at my friends’ home. In the end Antonella also interviewed me about my experience at CERN and after I left, and produced this summary if you want to check it out. I would also like to thank Miguel Ángel Marquina of the CERN Computing Seminar for organizing the presentation and all the details around it.

[Photo showing the author and his daughter sitting close to the lake in Geneva.][1]
Sitting by the lake with my daughter

Having spent more than 2 years in the region, it is the friends we have there that we miss the most. So it was great to meet them and old colleagues again. My family traveled there with me and we stayed with friends from Spain, so it was funny to see our daughter (who used to play with those friends’ kids all the time when we lived there) excusing her shyness for not speaking Spanish. But after a day or two they were all successfully playing together; it’s amazing how children can get along no matter what differences or barriers they find, while adults often resort to stupid feelings and dangerous actions. The mountains landscape is another thing we miss in Berlin and the Spring’s clear weather allowed us to fully gaze at the Jura or the Mont Blanc which should last us for another few more months. After that, I guess I’ll try to find some graffiti of mountains around Berlin 🙂