Gina Hoiska
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, so you already said my name, but I'm also known as Fusel around the world, especially around the net. So if anyone has come across that name, then yeah, that's me. Hi.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And yeah, well, Octoprint, that happened basically when I got myself a 3D printer back in late 2012 and found myself in a position that it was sitting here next to me in my home office, producing noise, producing fumes and annoying the hell out of me because I just wanted to not sit next to it while it was doing stuff, but it took hours to finish whatever it was doing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And so I figured there must be some way to just put it in another room, but still monitor it from afar. through Wi-Fi and such. And I figured there's probably something out there that does this. It turns out, nope, there wasn't something like this. And I happened to be a software engineer. So that became a bit of my vacation project over Christmas, pretty much.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I threw it on GitHub after that in January and thought I was done. Back then, it was just a really, really basic thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
monitoring temperature, already having this feedback loop where you also had some webcam implementation and all of that to be able to see what your 3D printer was doing while it was running through your jobs and some basic file management and such, but definitely way smaller project than it is now over 10 years later.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I threw it on GitHub and within a week or so, the emails started coming in and the feature requests started coming in. And then it took over my life. And now I've been doing it full time for almost 10 years and crowdfunded for, wait, we do have 2024 now. So that must be eight years, I think. Yeah. Eight years full time crowdfunded work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
An open source project.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
In my case, it was an Ultimaker. That was like, yeah, a big wooden box printer. No heat to bed.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Very slow and very weird. And the filament was still thicker. It printed with the 3 millimeter stuff, which actually was 2.85 millimeters, but still almost twice the diameter of what we use these days mostly, so 1.751. It's like melting crayons. Yeah. It was weird when I got my first roll of filament of 1.75 millimeter filament in my hands.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It felt so weird and not good and like it would break just by looking at it and such because I was just used to all of this 2.85. And then I think last year or so, I threw out all of the old 285 that I still had and looked at it and it looked so heavy and strong and what I was able to print with that. No way. So, yeah, things really changed.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, so the thing is that most printers out there actually run on open source firmware and have more or less agreed on a communication protocol. I say more or less because a lot of the printer vendors actually adjust the firmware often without really knowing what they are doing with the result that they break the firmware in the process and then things get really tricky for the users.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Because then usually they do not know how to fix it. And yeah, in the end, that is always when I'm very happy that I also built a plugin system into OctoPrint because that allows to work around these things so that people can just, if they have a printer like that and also happen to know how to code or can find someone who can see the issue and work around it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Or maybe if it's a large enough community, then maybe I can also do that. It's just a little plug-in that pretty much translates from the broken firmware into something that is more standard conform. And that way, yeah, pretty much everything that is sold out there is supported by OctoPrint. But these days it gets a bit more tricky because...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
A whole bunch of printers are now currently coming out that have a full-blown host system. So OctoPrint is a so-called print host. And a lot of printers now come with something similar, fully blown on board. So they only now have a Wi-Fi interface. They often have an integrated full graphical display and such. And it is really tricky now to access these systems.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
and use them with something that the vendor did not plan on, which is a bit sad.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
There's good news for you, though. Someone wrote a plugin that allows bamboo printers to work with OctoPrint.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh, that's awesome. I really want a Bamboo, so that's why I'm just like... I'm not sure if it works with all of the models and such, but it's the plugin developer, basically, on Octoprint. He's the one with the many plugins.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole. I saw one in person with a buddy. And mechanically, I was very, very impressed. But then also this news hit recently. Oh, not recently. That's almost been a year now or so, I think.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
where they had this funny security issue where some printers suddenly fetched the wrong stuff from the cloud and started printing in the middle of the night for models from strangers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah. And stuff like this happens, then this is a big, big no for me. And also the part with all of what 3D printing is these days, what 3D printing has come to over the last 10 years, that was... done on the shoulder of open source.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And now all of these companies, it's not just Bamboo, it's a bunch of others as well, are just rolling in and trying to lock everything down and trying to lock everything in and creating their own little gardens. And it's just not the way that I want to see all of this happening. I'm a bit afraid that we will lose all of the open access that we have now if stuff continues like that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So it should be obvious that it's pretty much impossible to test every possible printer, firmware, plug-in, operation system, starting state of software situations. So what I do before I actually roll out a full release is there goes a long, long phase of release candidates. And Octoprint has a release branch system built in. So if you feel fine with testing stuff that is not...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
necessarily fully stable yet then you can just switch over to another release branch and then you will get release candidates whenever I push those out and they actually get the same procedure that I do for every single release and I will go quickly over that later as well but
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The idea behind that is that if I have something like 1,000, 2,000 people out there testing a release candidate and putting it through several years of print duration over the course of the release candidate phase, then I can be pretty sure that a lot of these combinations that I would never be able to test has been tested. And
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, it usually takes something like three to four release candidates until no more bugs come in. And at that point, then I declare this stable. And of course, after I've pushed out a stable release, so the current stable version is 1.10. But we are now already at 1.10.1. So there are bug fix releases that I also push out.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Those do not go through a full release candidate phase again, but they only get bug fixes and maybe small minor improvements of existing functionality. They do not get new features. They do not get... big changes. They obviously also get security fixes, stuff like that. But I try to really limit what goes in there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And if it feels too risky, then it goes into the next stable release that will actually get the full release candidate phase again. And what I do for every single release is... So OctoPrint can basically run anywhere where you can run Python. But most people run it on a Raspberry Pi. So that is also what I concentrate on for testing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And there is this dedicated image that someone else is maintaining, Guy Sheffer, for OctoPrint, which is called OctoPi. And a lot of people confuse the image with the software and the software with the image, which also causes a lot of complications in support. But
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
anyhow uh so octopi is the most common environment that octoprint will be installed on out there so what i have here is i built myself a little test rig that has three raspberry pi threes which is the current basic option that i suggest so get a three of because that basically is the best thing that you can get the lowest supported version and uh if if
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
If you want something with more power, then of course you can get something else. But the 3 is like the base version that I look at. So I have three Raspberry Pi 3s there. And all of these have a little card adapter in there that can be switched through USB either to act as a mask storage device through a host. on the one end, or as an SD card on the other hand.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So that is slotted into the SD card slot of each of the Raspberry Pis, and all of these then go into a USB hub to a fourth Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Pi 4, actually, which I call the Flash Host. And that thing also has control over the little powered USB hub through which I power the three Raspberry Pis. And now I can individually power them on and off.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I can also individually unmount and mount their SD cards and flash them without having to physically release the SD card and push it into a flashing stick and then flash. That is what I did until 2020. And it was driving me nuts because...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
One of these things costs me $100, but they exist. Hey, sometimes that $100 is worth it. Yeah, it saves how much time? Yeah, I mean, I have three.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
That was really worth the money that I spent on that because what I do on every release is basically I flash a whole bunch of starting versions on the Raspberry Pis, like Octopi version X with Octoprint version Y. And then I look if I can upgrade to the release to be from that version through all of the regular update mechanism.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And for that, of course, I need not only flash the SD card, but also provision it with the Wi-Fi credentials and then SSH into that thing and do all of that. And all of this is automated now, thanks to this little test rig that I built. So I just tell it, flash device A to this version of Octopi, make sure Octoprint is at that version and also switch it to this release branch.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And then please also fire up the browser when it's done with that. And so before every release, I have this huge checklist in my tooling and go through all of that. And of course, the usual stuff like create new tags, create a change log, make sure the translation is up to date. The German one, this is the only one that I maintain.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Everything else needs to be supplied by people who actually speak the language fluently that they are targeting. also add supporter names and all of that. And then there's also always a whole test matrix that I write down in JSON that gets rendered into a little table. And that then tells me exactly what command line I have to enter into my scripting so that all of this will be done.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Then I wait, then a browser window pops up, then I click update, then I look if everything works. And Once I've gone through all of these, most usually something between seven to 10 test scenarios, which used to take a whole day and now takes less than an hour, if I'm lucky.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It saved me so much time. Every single release, I'm sitting here and have this huge smile because that saved me so much time. Yeah. And I also have a blog post about this test rig.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I can drop you the link and you can put it in the show notes and something.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And what happens then is at some point I'm through all of this and then I'm happy and stuff. And then I... do the regular release thing. So I just click on release on the GitHub release. I have already filled in the change log on all of that. And what now happens is a whole workflow runs through GitHub actions, which, first of all, runs the whole test suite against everything.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The unit tests are done. The end-to-end tests are done. And only if all of this is green and stuff is actually even released on PyPI and such as well. It triggers the test rig again, because what it will do now is it will automatically build an updated image with the new OctoPrint version, so a new OctoPi version with the new OctoPrint version. All of that will happen in GitHub Actions.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And then when this image is built, then the flash host in my network here at home on my desk will be triggered to download this image, fire it against the Pi, flash it, run the end-to-end tests against it. And if that is green, I get a little email in my inbox that says, hey, this image tested green. Do you want to release it?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And if I then click yes, then it will be released to the wild, basically.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Enterprise Java stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, Python was self-taught, started when I was. So yeah, my career was a bit weird. I started actually working at university because I wanted to do a PhD. And I worked at university. So in Germany, it's like you have some work. Either you are teaching or you are doing something administration. And at the same time, you're working towards your PhD. And I ended up in the administration part
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So I was administering the whole department's servers, all of them on really old Unix, not Linux, Unix machines. The mail server was older than me and not really finding much time for my PhD, but automating a lot of stuff back then, even already for the administrative tasks with Python. And then at some point I decided, yeah, okay, so the PhD thing isn't happening.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I'm not getting really enough time to work on that. And to be honest, I was more drawn to doing something like really with my hands and not just writing stuff and having students do the stuff with their hands. So I ended up as a software engineer. in the industry and ended up writing a bunch of software like in Java, IPTV related actually for a big telecommunication company.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And that went on for half a decade. And then I got myself a 3D printer and that arrest this history. So that's so cool.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So eight years ago, you had to make this decision to leave your job and go do... That decision was forced on me because the thing was 10 years ago already, I left this Java job because I was hired by a Spanish company who also was a vendor of 3D printers back then. They found me, they found Octoprint, they liked what I was doing, and they hired me full time to work on that back in 2014.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But then in 2016, they ran out of money and have since also gone under completely as far as I know. So they had to let me go. And now I found myself in the position that I had been doing Octoprint for almost two years at this point full time. Like it had grown a lot, the amount of work that it needed, maintenance work, community and all of that had grown.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But yeah, I was no longer getting paid for it. So it was the decision that I had to do, either try to do it as a side project again, which was an absolute no at this point already, because when I was still doing it as a side project, the first two or so years, that was already bad for my health.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
drop it altogether, which was something that I really did not want to do and go back to a regular normal nine to five kind of job or do something that I never thought I would ever do and try to just take the step into the darkness where I did not know at all what was going to happen and try to do this crowdfunded and basically self-employed and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I figured if I would not at least try that, I would probably kick myself for the rest of my life and asking myself what could have been. So I jumped into the cold water and did it. And so far it's been working.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I'm really not that big of a fan of this whole open core thing. And personally, I also felt like I could not really do that because I forked off of open source software. So the part that talks to your printer was something that I basically took from a slicer of all things because that already was talking to Cura. Cura had a communication part that I could just take over.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
A lot of people had contributed. So going like, yeah, I'm going to close this down now and we are only going to keep an open source. It just felt wrong and to this day feels wrong. And I believe in open source and I... find it a bit weird that it's still news for people out there that, yeah, open source in general should be something that should be funded.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
We shouldn't have to jump through hoops by selling stuff around it because what we do with maintaining open source is already a full-time job.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I have some business sponsorships, but most of the people are really just, yeah, your average Octoprint user who has one or two or something printers and just likes what I'm doing and throws me something between one to five bucks per month. And if you have... a whole lot of people who do that, then this matters.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, so I have anonymous usage tracking built into OctoPrint, all of this also self-built, completely GDPR OK-ish, and only on my own servers with my own tech stack and all that. And this is completely opt-in, however. So if people do not say yes, it's okay to track me, then I will never know about the install. But according to that, I have around 150,000 instances out there.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And based on some fun install stats from the PyWheels project, who suddenly saw huge... download spikes on the packages they host for Raspberry Pi. Whenever I pushed out a new update, I know that the number is likely around 10 times higher.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The first time that I saw the first numbers come in after the first release with the anonymous user checking, I literally hit under my desk because... That was just, I felt so much responsibility in that moment. And it felt so heavy, literally heavy on my shoulders. I just had this, I just had to hide. So I just sat down under my table and breathed deeply and took a minute.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, and it's also, I consider it my life's work. I mean, I don't know if I will do this forever, especially not given the whole open source printer situation that we talked about briefly, because at some point I might just get pushed out of the market by a tendency to locking everything down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But yeah, it definitely feels like I have done something that actually has helped people, which is not something that I can say about my previous job, I have to say.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's more the enterprise bit also. It's more the enterprise than the Java, for sure. The Java itself was okay. I mean, you can also build good software in that, and you could also build performance software in that, and it's not as slow as people always say. But on the other hand, I also have to say that with Python, everything got even faster. Not in the run speed, but in the development speed.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
So much less overhead and...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's just... You didn't see the first kind of Python that I wrote when I was writing Java during the day and then at night. So a bunch of stuff is still not in Snake Caps, but in the other one. CamelCase. CamelCase, thank you. Because, yeah, I mean, I was a Java developer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh, I can top that. I mean, OctoPrint pretty much is a web application, and the backend is written in Python, but the frontend is JavaScript.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And switching between Python and JavaScript is almost as bad as switching between Python and Java, because I go back to Python, I start putting semicolons behind every single line, and I go from Python to JavaScript, and I just try to start my blocks with columns instead of braces.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And it happens daily. Just yesterday, I can't remember what exactly it was. I just remember that yesterday I was like, no, Gina, this is not Python when I was editing a JavaScript file. I do that all the time.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
There is a bunch of stuff that actually needs to be done, which boils down more or less to taking care of some tech stack situations, because I'm still on a very old version of all of the stuff that runs the UI. But because of the plugin system, it's really tricky to update that or to swap that for something new, because all of the UI of all of the plugins out there would suddenly stop working.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I've spent a lot of time thought into how to approach this and especially how to best get this working. And I'm still in the process of doing this. This is one of the bigger parts that I'm working on. Also for the better part of a decade, actually, I've now been also working on a new communication layer. And that is also a very tricky thing to pull off.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I also have had really bad luck with it because every time that I actually get on it and get it to a point where I'm almost ready to like, I'm 80% or 90% to something happens. So the first time I ran into a complete and utter problem with my whole approach because of some firmware issues out there that I wasn't aware of. So I had to scrap everything and start anew.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The second time I lost the job and had to go crowdfunding. The third time I ended up in a breakup after over 15 years of a relationship. The third time or fourth time, I don't remember. something like COVID happened. And so I'm almost too scared now to work on that anymore. That's a lot.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It's like this huge project that really needs to get done to make everything more modular and to be able to make it easily adaptable to new developments out there and to possibly also swap the whole communication stack out to target something else than serial communication. like something like network or so.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But the only problem is that it is a project in it of itself, English at this time of the day. And as I already said, I am the only maintainer. So I also have to take care of all the bug fixes, all the security fixes, all the other new features, all of the community management, architecture stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I deprecate stuff, write big, big, nasty warnings into change logs, hope that someone actually reads them, that at some point, some versions later remove the deprecated stuff after it was logging warnings and warnings and warnings to the logs for several months. And if stuff then breaks, plugin developers can suddenly react quite fast, I learned.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I had this quite nasty situation that, yeah, Python 2 to Python 3.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I was right in the middle of it because all of the plugins out there were Python 2 only. Octoprint was Python 2 only. And it took a long, long time to get Octoprint up and running. And that was also thanks to a lot of very, very nice contributors who helped there doing a lot of the legwork and then spending half a year or so ironing out all the bugs that were introduced in the process.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
uh pushing out blog posts pushing up tools that would help people to move over marking plugins as python 2 or python 3 compatible automatically on the plugin repository by yeah basically by looking at the code automatically and detecting if it would compile under python 3 or not and it was an absolute nightmare but somehow we pulled it off but
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
It was exhausting. And 5% of OctoPrint's user base, according to the anonymous user tracking, is still on Python 2. Wow. And at this point, I just have given up trying to motivate them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I mean, OctoPrint is Python 3 exclusive now since version 1.6, 5? I have no idea, actually. Something like mid-2020 or so. I can't remember exactly.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And there are still people who are left on the Python 2 only version who I redirected to take their updates from somewhere else, just in case there was anything that I still needed to push out, but so far have never done anything and will now also not do because those 5%, they can just like, if a security issue or something like that shows up, they really should just finally do the jump.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I can imagine. My knowledge is still stuck on Java 7.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I would have done so many architecture decisions differently that are now biting me in my behind over and over again.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Do you have a time machine? Apart from that, I mean... I think most of the stuff, if I just had known any better, so if I had found some more information on some things, then yeah, that would have saved me a lot of work. I mean, some of the problems I actually just managed to iron out with the current release because I basically have two web server situations going on.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I have Tornado sitting in there, single-threaded. Async. And on that, I have Flask sitting, which is sync. So that is really a bad idea. You do not want to mix that up. But in 2012, Gina didn't know any better than that. And now I know.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The good thing is that I found a solution for that, which means we had huge performance gains in the latest version that I just pushed out now because now I managed to make the whole connection between the two things as well so that they don't block each other anymore. And so...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The whole web page loads faster now, and it's way less likely that some third-party plugin can now block the whole server as well. But these are things that if I had known them back then, if I had just better understood
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
the kind of stuff that I was working on because I mean I didn't know about 3D printing protocols back then I didn't know about Flask I didn't know about Tornado I didn't know about all of that I was just like okay this might maybe work and if I connect this here and then there and blah and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Then I added a plugin system on top and that made everything way more complicated because now you have an ecosystem. You cannot just rip out parts anymore without destroying parts of the ecosystem in the process. And so that is what is now making things way more complicated.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Yeah, I mean, I'm still here, right? So it can't be too bad. And yeah, the things I now know about 3D printing firmware and especially about the differences between the various variations, honestly, I wish I didn't know as much sometimes. There'll be dragons.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Oh, that's something, by the way, I also learned. I never do releases after Wednesday anymore. Because that gives me Thursday end, even though it's usually my day off because I'm on a four-day work week. If push comes to shove, it gives me Friday and it doesn't ruin my whole weekend. I did a bunch of releases on Fridays and it cost me one too many weekends.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Why would you do that? But you know you have produced some stable software if after a huge new point release, not point release, a minor release, only such stuff comes in.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And this time, I can say that I managed to do that. I got only really, really weird, really odd stuff.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Right? I thought so as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
You need to keep in mind, I automated that because I am the only maintainer so that I had more time to do the maintenance.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
The good thing is, you often still learn something new in the process. So even if it's all for the... That's what I'm saying.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I'm not sure if I would call it a favorite. I have a very old Prusa Mark III by now that I have modified a whole lot. And that works and works and works and works. And I actually just printed a guitar with it that I gave away as a birthday present to the father of my partner. who was really, really happy about that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Sometimes on Mastodon, sometimes on Printables, but mostly probably on Mastodon. So chaos.social slash adfusel. And that's also where I post everything pretty much that I make. Currently, I'm more into making print and play board games for some reason that just
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Mostly functional stuff, I have to say. So I printed some parts for my bike, like for mounting the two locks that I have to the frame and for mounting the radar unit that I have to tell me when a car is coming from back and such. Stuff like that. Then together with a buddy, we did a whole project for the Chaos Communication Congress and the Chaos Communication Camp last year.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
which were basically little environment sensors that we put into little gnome figures. And I printed all of these gnome figures.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
And I'm just like, you make all the things. This is actually the reason why I got a 3D printer. Because I had all of these ideas constantly how to solve certain issues in a household, like just around the home. But I never had a way to do that. And then I got a 3D printer and suddenly everything looked like a nail for my new hammer. And then later I got a...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
i got a laser cutter and then i i got a new cutter and can we just talk about you should be gina fusel the problem solver yeah but like you gotta add to like that like part of its official title now i love it yes that is actually one of my best skills here that is something that also back when i was still uh
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Because then it is, you know, like when you're lying in bed and you're trying to sleep and your brain is going, oh, by the way, you might be able to solve this that way or you could do this and such. So I'm now listening to audiobooks so that I can actually fall asleep because otherwise this stupid thing just won't shut up.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
I have a trick up my sleeve. I only listen to audiobooks I have already read.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
But then I'm like, oh, the book just got good. I just give it something to listen to and then it shuts up. And because I already know it, I get tired and I sleep. It doesn't work with podcasts. It doesn't work with books I don't already know because then I want to actually...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Flavors of Ship It! (Interview)
Like, it's awesome.