Blog
Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

2 posts

Software Engineer

Linux IoT developer working on snaps, Ubuntu Core and other IoT/embedded applications and deployments. Previous experience includes working on Mathematica at Wolfram Research.

Ian Johnson
23 December 2020

Why LZO was chosen as the new compression method

Desktop Article

Everyone wants fast applications. Recently, we provided a mechanism to make snap applications launch faster by using the LZO format. We introduced this change because users reported desktop snaps starting more slowly than the same applications distributed via traditional, native Linux packaging formats like Deb or RPM. After a thorough in ...

Ian Johnson
30 October 2020

Introducing etrace – a multi-purpose application profiling tool

Desktop Article

These days, the internal workings of Linux applications involve many different moving parts. Sometimes, it can be rather difficult to debug them when things go wrong or run slower than expected. Tracing an application’s execution is one way of understanding potential issues without diving into the source code. To this end, we wrote an app ...