news
OpenSUSE: Open Build Service, GAFAM, and Planet News Roundup
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Medium ☛ Fixing a UTF-8 Encoding Crash in OBS’s Workflow YAML Downloader
A few weeks ago I picked up my first real bug in the Open Build Service (OBS) codebase, part of the openSUSE project: a production crash that had been showing up on Errbit every time a Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub workflow config with the “wrong” character in it got synced. Here’s what broke, why it broke, and how the fix closed it out.
The bug
OBS lets you wire up a Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub repository so pushes trigger a workflow, things like package rebuilds via webhooks. When that webhook fires, Workflows::YAMLDownloader pulls down the workflow's YAML config file from Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub and writes it to a Tempfile so OBS can parse it.
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Medium ☛ Eight Modules, One Summer: My Amazon ML Summer School 2026 Journey
The email came on July 2nd. The program didn’t start till July 11th, so I had a few days to just sit with it. Getting in wasn’t one step - Amazon first ran an SOP and Resume screening round that narrowed about 134,000 applicants down to 30,000, then an online assessment cut that down to the final 3,000. Clearing that assessment is what actually got me in.
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OpenSUSE ☛ Planet News Roundup
This week highlights the release of Agama 24 with a two-for-one announcement covering versions 23 and 24, the beta release of Plasma 6.8 along with its first “This Week in Plasma” review, the first bug-fix update of KDE Gear 26.08 plus feature overviews of Kdenlive and Minuet, the Tumbleweed week 37 review and a September ARM update roundup, Intel’s OpenVINO 2026.4.0 release, the openSUSE Kudos report for August, the reveal of the GNOME 51 wallpapers, and a fond farewell to the Linux Hispano comic strip after 1,144 installments.