Entre code et gazon

GUADEC 2016, Karlsruhe

9:53 - GNOME

Our annual gathering of GNOMies took place in sunny Karslruhe earlier this month and as usual it was great to meet again, and this year again GUADEC was the perfect reminder of the "GNOME is people" spirit.

Nice thing this year was that almost everyone was staying in the same place, or close; this favoured social gatherings even more than in the previous years. This was also helped by the organized events, every evenings, from barbecue to picnic, from local student-run bar to beer garden (thanks Centricular), and more.

And during the days? Interesting talks of course, like the one offered by Rosanna about how the foundation runs (and how crazy is the US bank system), or the Builder update by Christian, and team meetings.

Thanks again to the GNOME foundation for supporting travels and accomodations for lots of persons (including me), and to the organizing committee, you made one great GUADEC.

GNOME 3.18 is out!

9:45 - GNOME

We left codenames and macaques years ago but this year at GUADEC came the idea of a small gift to the GUADEC and GNOME.Asia teams, they do an amazing work, and here we are, the GNOME 3.18 release has been named "Gothenburg" as a token of recognition for this year's GUADEC team.

GUADEC is an important moment in the life of the GNOME project, this is where we gather and assert we are foremost a community of dedicated persons, all working to produce the best computing environment we can. It is with that point in mind that I will nevertheless use this space to pinpoint a single person and congratulate him for all the work he put in 3.18.

Let me introduce him, Carlos Soriano. Round of applause please.

Files (né Nautilus) is a key part of the desktop and has a very long history but he was not intimidated and helped by the designers and other fellow developers, Carlos put a massive amount of work into it this cycle and the result is simply fantastic. Again when I was taking some screenshots for the release notes I was amazed by all the small details, like the way a "New Bookmark" entry slides when dragging an item over the sidebar.

Voila. Carlos also did many other things. GNOME 3.18 also has many other things. This was my highlight.

Thanks to everyone involved.

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GUADEC 2015

17:43 - GNOME

And here comes my own tale of GUADEC 2015, and first is the city, Göteborg, it has it all takes: a big river, parks and stairs (two of my favourite city elements), huge brick buildings, and trams for public transport (and they even have stairs within some trams)...

First evening was Thursday, and while Patrick was waiting at the hostel and distributing card keys to attendants, for hours (thanks!), the rest of the GUADEC troop was already at Järntorget, enjoying beers and people we do not see for the rest of the year.

Then came the core days, many interesting sessions, of course there was the trademark keynote by Pamela Chestek, but my U+1F493 BEATING HEART goes to Behdad talk, "Fonts without Borders", he showed big achievements in script rendering, with enormous test suites, but it will be remembered for the U+1F42F TIGER FACE part, colour emoticons, usable in filenames, correctly displayed in menu items, all demonstrated live.

And that was it, so short, gone the core days, but then came the BOFs, with a change of venue, and an even better transportation system than the public trams. Like many others I really enjoyed taking the boat every morning, and evening, to get to the IT University.

The BOFs and hackfest days were great, I did various things but most importantly I got to fix the integration of the "getting started" documentation pages in help.gnome.org (I think I get to fix this one every time we have documentation hackfests, but this time it is for good), I also got to play with OpenShift to create module activity reports (but it lacks diskspace, so it cannot process all modules), and to offer a form server to GSOC admins (after discussions with Lasse and Alexandre Franke).

Bonus: a keynote we didn't have. Maybe you drank the excellent beers from the Ocean micro-brewery. It is not displayed on their website but they have also helped produce the "We Can Do It" beer.. It's a beer produced by FemAle. And here came way too late the keynote idea, about them talking about their "diversity" experience in the beer-enthusiasts community, and what they did. (you can read the story at the Guardian, Revolution brewing as Sweden’s first beer made by women goes on sale.)

Thanks again to the GNOME foundation for supporting travels and accomodations for lots of persons (including me).