[[!tag baserock announcement]]

I was hired last year ago by Codethink to work on Baserock, a new method and toolset for developing embedded Linux systems.

While I don't have a lot of experience developing embedded Linux systems specifically, I have a fair bit of experience devoloping Linux distributions, from Debian and Ubuntu, and that's quite similar. I had already written up some ideas for doing test driven distro development, and system level branching and merging. Then I got hired to do that stuff for real.

Baserock is still a work in progress, but we've just made a public development release of the free software version, and I can now talk about it. This blog post is my own; I am not talking for my employer.

I won't write about all the aspects and features of Baserock, since that would make this blog post really long. You can read that stuff in the wiki, anyway, and ask questions on the Baserock mailing list and IRC channel if you're curious. I just thought I'd mention what I've been doing this past year at work.

However, there's one thing I want to especially mention: I'm excited. Getting to re-invent workflows and tools for system development is fun. I can get up in the morning, decide to try a new version of gcc, make the one line change, and run the one shell command to rebuild everything, and play with the new system pretty soon after. And if it doesn't work, no worries, I'll just not merge that branch into the mainstream. And then I still have time for other things that workday.

Baserock is getting rid of the unnecessary friction in system development, all the stupid little things you have to do just to keep working. That is going to make a lot of developers lives better in this corner of the software development universe.