20 years of Linux Format
Would the spacetime continuum stand up to four editors of Linux Format in one place? Neil Mohr wanted to find out…
Jonni Bidwell feels like he’s being interviewed, as Nick Veitch, Paul Hudson, Graham Morrison and Neil Mohr line up to reminisce about the many years of producing magazines and tweaking Linux.
It’s our two-decade anniversary! We weren’t quite sure what would happen when we assembled three past LXF editors and one from the present in a quaint tavern by the River Avon to celebrate this. But we did it anyway and the results were most cordial. Our little Linux magazine has an illustrious history, an enthusiastic readership and has somehow managed to survive for 20 years without management knowing what a Linux is. So we summoned Paul Hudson (a titan of all things Swift and IOS, and creator of the legendary Brain Party), Nick Veitch and Graham Morrison (both now at Canonical), together with current helmsman Neil Mohr, to discuss Linux, magazines and of course to enjoy fine ales while the rest of Future Towers was chipping away at the content mine. Naturally, the insubordinate Jonni and long-serving Effy (there are unverified accounts of him joining sometime in late 2005) came along for the banter too.
Linux Format: Do we agree that getting kids into coding at school is A Good Thing™? Nick Veitch, Paul Hudson, Graham Morrison: PH: Kids these days are amazingly good at coding at school. It’s remarkable. I volunteer at a school for year six girls. I think they had a challenge last year, part of the Oxford University Computing Challenge. I showed it to some Swifties and proper 10-15 year IOS veterans couldn’t solve it, so it was hard. And then here’s these 11-year-olds solving it on their laptops using Scratch and Python.
And it worked. Respect. I think it was a problem like Maisie has a sequence: 2,4,5,10,11,22,23. Calculate the 150th term in the sequence. You can see the sequence immediately, just double it then add one. But then when you calculate it, the numbers get big and doesn’t fit after 75 doubles. Python manages it fine because of flexible data types, but Swift just says, “Sorry I can’t handle that” and crashes. It was quite exciting seeing these kids solving things some of my peers couldn’t.
NV: I was a little disappointed to hear that GCSE Computer Studies no longer has a practical project component – well it does, but it’s not assessed. So you have to do this project to prove that you understand stuff, but you don’t get any points for it.
GM: Haha would you like some thankless work to do?
JB: I guess it prepares you for later life a bit. Valuable lessons about jumping through hoops.
PH: I am looking forward to working with secondary schools. What I’ve seen at primary school is remarkable. A lot of kids now learned Scratch aged 7-9, and they wanted to know what’s next. They weren’t ready for hard coding then, but now I guess they are.
NV: We had an open job for a software engineer on the Kubernetes team at Canonical. My colleague was going through CVS and sent a coding challenge to about ten of them. It was a fairly simple Python challenge, something about each of Santa’s helpers getting paid according to their age. So there were a couple of calculations working out ages in days.
Then you had to divide the money into different pots somehow. I mean, it really shouldn’t have been hard for these people, but more than half of them didn’t supply code that actually worked. I mean it was well-written, they had docstrings and well-constructed classes and that sort of thing. But when you ran it on the given test cases, it just spat out the wrong answer, which was quite disappointing. I thought to myself “I could’ve done this. I could be a software engineer”.
PH: The thing I’ve found about coding tests is that it’s easy enough to find someone who can pass the test and write the code. It’s significantly harder to train someone not to be a jerk when they’re writing code. To handle communication nicely, do code reviews nicely and write tests properly.
NV: That’s true, we did look at the code, and some of those who got it right did so in a shabby way, which was called out. My colleague’s bottom line was if you can’t make sure the code meet the criteria set out in the test, then there’s no point. Because lack of correctness is a higher-order failure.
LXF: In general, is it straightforward hiring people at Canonical?
NV: I think Canonical has an easy time really because loads of people want to work there. Loads of people, quite rightly, believe that having that company on their CV is a big plus. And that they’re going to work with some very clever people, which is also true. There’s certainly a lot of applications. Plus the work-fromhome thing is great. It means you’re not restricted in intake to a particular geographical location. But I still think getting quality people, and hiring in general, is difficult. Look at the mistakes I’ve made.
GM: I was the second-best candidate when I applied to Linux Format…
JB: Me too! And I met the first-best one later on.
NV: I remember that, we had a spreadsheet and someone was two points ahead of you, but we didn’t like that someone. I also remember one particular question from that interview.
GM: Yes, “What three questions would you ask Richard Stallman?” There was this long period of silence, then I answered, “who’s Richard Stallman?” That was a memorable introduction to free software. Actually I stand by that answer now.
LXF: Let’s delve into the history. Nick, you started on issue 1, that’s easy. Was Robin Fenwick just a freelancer?
NV: Yes, everyone was a freelancer initially. On day one the entire team consisted of me and two empty desks.
NM: Best kind of desks. How long did it take to fill those desks with rubbish? Which I gather was the fashion at that time.
NV: About a week. They were quite big desks. By the end of the week we had three people working on Linux Format. I think that was it. We didn’t have a production editor. Belated apologies for all those typos in the first issue. Richard Drummond came along as a free transfer later, when
Amiga Format closed. Or maybe he did something else just after that, but he came along and I was very grateful to have him. Because he actually knew something about Linux. He’s a lovely guy, one of those very unassuming but very clever people. You don’t really realise the extent of his knowledge until it comes out of his mouth.
He contributed to the kernel while he was on the mag, in his spare time.
GM: He had spare time???
LXF: Where did Linux Format come from?
Was it all off the back of Linux Answers?
NV: It was I guess. The group publisher said that we needed to do a Linux magazine because the Linux Answers thing made us loads of money, and we want to do it regularly. I’m not really sure why they asked me to do it, but one thing led to another. Oh look, you’ve got a copy of issue 1 there…
JB: Is that a metallic finish? What gilted times! So we had money to spend.
NV: I don’t know if it’s still the case, but it was the only magazine that Future ever launched that was already in profit before it was printed. People did query why we had some unheard of distro on the disc. That may have been one of the shady advertising deals that was done beforehand. I’m not quite sure how those things worked, and no one would ever explain it to you.
PH:
LXF: Jonni’s quite a rare breed, he’s one of very few disc editors.
JB: …still alive? It’s easier nowadays, Grubmkrescue is my friend.
NV: Believe it or not, in those days we had distros on the disc, but we also had a lot of other useful stuff.
NM: The year before Future bought Imagine Publishing, Linux User & Developer
dropped the disc from the magazine. And sales tanked. We were quite taken aback. But apparently discs are still important to many people.
PH: Even today I still remember the extraordinary care that Mike [Saunders] put into making the disc. He’d cram as much as he could in there. He’d customise Ubuntu to be as good as it possibly could. This was really a loved disc, the best you could possibly do at that time. It was a real value-add to the magazine.
NM: It’s probably not so important in 2020, but I still think there’s loads of people with poor network connections. And ISOS these days are all 2.5GB. And also, it’s a busy world and no one’s got time, so if you say here’s a disc that someone’s made…
PH: Yeah, let’s try this thing.
JB:
NV: I remember once, Mike had done his thing and I was testing the disc. Of course it was fine. So I put it in the envelope and sent it off to the duplicators, which was in Germany at the time. They didn’t send a proof back or anything back then, so what you sent was the final thing. When the magazine came back I realised I’d sent the wrong disc. It was a slightly earlier version of the disc, and we ended up having to redo the whole disc run, recall the magazine, stick new discs on and all that. It cost tens of thousands of pounds. I had to go to a meeting afterwards about it, and people wanted to know, “How can we make sure this never happens again?” And with those sort of jiffy-bag-related errors, I really didn’t know the answer.
NM: We’ve got bulletproof systems in place now, haven’t we?
JB: Well, we don’t have jiffy bags if that counts for anything.
PH: At least Nick’s story was an accident. Remember those bendy eco discs we had for a while? They thought it’d save some money on international postage. They were cool, you could bend them and ping them around. But they didn’t work in any slot-loading drive.
LXF: Did any of you think Linux Format would still be going 20 years after launch?
PH: Well I started at issue 30, and I definitely thought this would be the case. Linux Format readers are deeply passionate about playing around with this stuff, learning and experimenting. Do you remember this phenomenon, Graham? You’d install the latest distro, Kubuntu or whatever, and it would be great. After three months it would start to get creaky. Then after six months you’d have to reinstall it.
GM: Yep, things used to get so broken. I’d usually install something else. There were periods where I’d used absolutely every distro under the sun because of that.
PH: That feeling of experimenting and trying and enjoying, you never get bored of it. The journey is the hobby, not the destination, if that makes sense.
LXF: So Graham, how did you get into
Linux Format?
GM: Well, I was at a bit of a loose end and didn’t really know what to do. I’d done Computer Science and didn’t want to