2025-12-04 –, Walnascar
Maintaining a complex Yocto layer like meta-ros is more than just writing BitBake recipes—it's a balancing act across automation, cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and community collaboration. This talk explores how cross-domain skills—from Python scripting to cloud-native CI, and from configuration tooling to open source community engagement—can transform the sustainability and usability of embedded software layers.
Through real-world examples, Rob Woolley shares how embracing automation, reproducibility, and scalable testing has helped streamline maintenance and improve accessibility for developers. The session will also highlight the importance of fostering a vibrant community around open source projects, and how thoughtful tooling and infrastructure choices can empower contributors and users alike.
Whether you're a Yocto veteran or just getting started, this talk offers insights into how diverse technical skills and a collaborative mindset can make embedded development more approachable, efficient, and fun.
Maintaining the meta-ros layer for the Yocto Project is more than just embedded systems work—it's a multidisciplinary effort that spans Python automation, cloud-native CI/CD, developer experience, and open source community building. In this talk, Rob Woolley shares lessons learned from maintaining meta-ros, including the use of the superflore Python tool to auto-generate BitBake recipes from upstream ROS metadata, and how GitHub Actions streamline monthly syncs with rosdistro.
Rob will also explore how integrating the kas configuration tool has simplified onboarding and reproducibility, despite the complexity of supporting 20+ Yocto/ROS distribution combinations. He’ll walk through the use of advanced Git techniques to manage this matrix, and how a Terraform-powered GitLab CI farm on AWS spot instances enables scalable, cost-effective testing—coordinated via GitLab SaaS.
The session will highlight how SDK generation, pre-built images, and native build environments improve developer workflows, and how community engagement through GitHub, Discord, Discourse, and biweekly working group meetings fosters collaboration and innovation. Whether you're an embedded developer, DevOps engineer, or open source contributor, this talk will show how cross-domain skills can elevate the sustainability and impact of a complex Yocto layer.
Rob Woolley is a Senior Principal Technologist at Wind River in the Office of the CTO, where he focuses on integrating emerging technologies into safety-critical and cloud-native platforms. He is the maintainer of the Robot Operating System (ROS) on OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project. He is also a member of the Zephyr RTOS Technical Steering Committee and an active contributor to ELISA Space Grade Linux and SpaceROS. Rob also works commercially with Wind River's VxWorks RTOS and safety hypervisor. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo.