Blog posts written by Robin Winslow

Robin Winslow
18 February 2021

Regex basics

Design Design

An overview of regex and how to use it, from a few different angles. Including appropriate warnings like ‘avoid regex’.

Robin Winslow
18 February 2021

Robin Winslow
20 July 2020

Design and Web team summary – 20th July 2020

Article Design

The web team here at Canonical run two week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration. Meet the team I am from a small island of Colombia in the Caribbean although I grew up in Barcelona, where I went to University to study Industrial Design Engineering. After my

Robin Winslow
20 July 2020

Robin Winslow
17 January 2020

Design and Web team summary – 17 January 2020

Article Design

The second iteration of this year is the last one before our mid-cycle sprint next week. Here’s a short summary of the work the squads in the Web & Design team completed in the last 2-week iteration. Web, Ubuntu and Brand squad Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites

Robin Winslow
17 January 2020

Robin Winslow
26 November 2019

Design and Web team summary – 22 November 2019

Article Design

This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work. Web squad Web is the squad that develop and maintain most of the brochure websites across the Canonical. Takeovers and engage pages This iteration we built two webinars with engage

Robin Winslow
26 November 2019

Robin Winslow
19 November 2019

Avoiding dropped connections in nginx containers with “STOPSIGNAL SIGQUIT”

Article Cloud and server

(Also published on my blog at robinwinslow.uk) Update: The default used in the official nginx docker image was changed from SIGTERM to SIGQUIT in November 2020, so this should no longer be an issue for Docker or Kubernetes users. nginx is a very popular web server. It may have just become the most popular web

Robin Winslow
19 November 2019

Robin Winslow
19 August 2019

Design and Web team summary – 16 August 2019

Article Ubuntu

This iteration was the Web & design team’s first iteration of the second half of our roadmap cycle, after returning from the mid-cycle roadmap sprint in Toronto 2 weeks ago. Priorities have moved around a bit since before the cycle, and we made a good start on the new priorities for the next 3 months.

Robin Winslow
19 August 2019

Robin Winslow
26 January 2019

Our new team practices site, and the democratic repository behind it

Design Desktop

A month ago, we published our web and design team practices website, from the repository that we’ve been building up for nearly two years now. I’ll try to explain why I am so proud of it. Why practices? A strong team needs agreed standards and principles, to help anchor discussions and illuminate common goals. When

Robin Winslow
26 January 2019

Robin Winslow
12 December 2018

How to manage your Git history: Tips for keeping your commits tidy

Design Desktop

One of the things we’re currently working on in the web and design team is a page about writing Git commit messages for our team practices website (I hope to write more about the practices website itself in the coming days). As part of that discussion, we jotted down some quick tips for managing commit

Robin Winslow
12 December 2018

Robin Winslow
20 April 2018

Design and Web team summary – 20 April 2018

Article Cloud and server

Welcome to the latest work and updates from the design and web team. We manage all web projects across Canonical – from www.ubuntu.com to the Juju GUI we help to bring beauty and consistency to all the web projects. MAAS Table consistency and improvements MAAS UI contains a lot of data in tables, posing an...

Robin Winslow
20 April 2018

Robin Winslow
8 September 2017

Command-line usability: A terminal user’s thought process

User Experience Ubuntu

I’ve been thinking about the usability of command-line terminals a lot recently. Command-line interfaces remain mystifying to many people. Usability hobbyists seem as inclined to ask why the terminal exists, as how to optimise it. I’ve also had it suggested to me that the discipline of User Experience (UX) has little to...

Robin Winslow
8 September 2017

Robin Winslow
5 July 2017

Simplifying local development: The ./run executable

User Experience Ubuntu

Canonical’s webteam manage over 18 websites as well as many supporting projects and frameworks. These projects are built with any combination of Python, Ruby, NodeJS, Go, PostgreSQL, MongoDB or OpenStack Swift. We have 9 full-time developers – half the number of websites we have. And naturally some of our projects get a...

Robin Winslow
5 July 2017

Robin Winslow
31 May 2017

Our open source websites

Featured Ubuntu

Nowadays free software is everywhere – from browsers to encryption software to operating systems. Even so, it is still relatively rare for the code behind websites and services to be opened up. Stepping into the open Three years ago we started to move our website projects to Github, and we also took this opportunity to

Robin Winslow
31 May 2017

Robin Winslow
7 October 2015

Keynotes from my first PyCon – friendly and inspiring

Featured Ubuntu

Last weekend I went to my first Pycon, my second conference in a fortnight. The conference runs from Friday to Monday, with 3 days of talks followed by one day of “sprints”, which is basically a hack day. PyCon has a code of conduct to discourage any form of othering: Happily, PyCon UK is a

Robin Winslow
7 October 2015

Python learnings from PyCon

Featured Ubuntu

The weekend before last, I went to PyCon UK 2015. I already wrote about the keynotes, which were more abstract. Here I’m going to talk about the other talks I saw, which were generally more technical or at least had more to do with Python. Summary The talks I saw covered a whole range of

Robin Winslow
7 October 2015