I started writing this while sitting in Stansted on my way home from the annual UK Debian BBQ. I’m finally home now, after a great weekend catching up with folk. It’s a good social event for a bunch of Debian folk, and I’m very grateful that Steve and Jo continue to make it happen. These days there are also a number of generous companies chipping in towards the cost of food and drink, so thanks also to Codethink and QvarnLabs AB for the food, Collabora and Mythic Beasts for the beer and Chris for the coffee. And Rob for chasing us all for contributions to cover the rest.

I was trying to remember when the first one of these I attended was; trawling through mail logs there was a Cambridge meetup that ended up at Steve’s old place in April 2001, and we’ve consistently had the summer BBQ since 2004, but I’m not clear on what happened in between. Nonetheless it’s become a fixture in the calendar for those of us in the UK (and a number of people from further afield who regularly turn up). We’ve become a bit more sedate, but it’s good to always see a few new faces, drink some good beer (yay Milton), eat a lot and have some good conversations. This year also managed to get me a SheevaPlug so I could investigate #837989 - a bug with OpenOCD not being able to talk to the device. Turned out to be a channel configuration error in the move to new style FTDI support, so I’ve got that fixed locally and pushed the one line fix upstream as well.