GUADEC 2015

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)...

Bricks and stairs and park, Göteborg, August 9th 2015

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).

Builder, builder everywhere, Göteborg, August 9th 2015

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.)

Göteborg, August 9th 2015

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