Tag: guadec

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GUADEC 2019

Meeting my fellow GNOMies is something I look forward to every year. For eight years now I have traveled to participate in GUADEC and returned home with my head thinking of next year’s edition of the conference.

This year, I was busy with lots of activities, but still, I managed to chill with the friends I work with online throughout the whole year.  Putting faces into new names is also something very pleasant in these opportunities.

In the pre-registration party, I hosted a “Newcomers dinner“. Not many people could attend because of their personal travel plans, but those that participated were excited about being at the conference and getting to know so many cool people.

Besides that, it was the first GUADEC that we had a trained Code of Conduct Incident Response Team. We did an extensive training workshop with Otter Tech. Highly recommended!

Right at the first talks day, I hosted the interns’ lightning talks, that thanks to the amazing local team, are recorded and available online. The audience (and myself) were enthusiastic about hearing from the interns. After a few years of organizing these activities, I can still remember myself being an intern and giving my lightning talk back in 2012. Time flies! 🙂

The quality of talks is always outstanding, so I listed below the ones I attended and recommend watching online:

  • Desktop Secrets Management for the Future by Daiki Ueno: I have lately been heavily interested in application sandboxing, so it was great catching up with Daiki’s work and ideas for our keyring story.
  • Managing GNOME Sessions with Systemd by Benjamin Berg and Iain Lane: It is being great and educative to follow their progress throughout the years on this task. The cherry on the cake is seeing this work landing and explained in Benjamin’s blog post.
  • Designing Multi-Process Application Security by Christian Hergert: Watching Christian talk is always exciting and educational. We are lucky to have such skillful developer in our project, and I definitely learned valuable lessons on application security.
  • Portals – Principles and Practice by Matthias Clasen: As I mentioned above, I have been lately interested in application sandboxing, so I couldn’t miss Matthias’ talk on Portals. It is so nice to see our application ecosystem evolving with Flatpak and its technologies.
  • GNU HEALTH: The Fight for our Rights in the Public Health System by Luis  Falcón: I personally care a lot about such social issues especially for being myself originally from the developing world, where people often don’t enjoy the same rights people in the developed world take for granted. The keynote was very well chosen.
  • Environmentally Friendly GNOME by Philip Withnall: IMPORTANT! We are running out of time to stop climate change, and I think every segment of society needs to discuss the issue. I hope to see the ideas discussed in this talk brought forward in our community.
  • Simple is Hard – Creating Beautiful App Icons by Jakub Steiner: Jimmac is so creative and talented that I can’t ever miss his talks. It is great to work with the design team on a daily basis, and this was a good opportunity to better understand their creative processes.
  • Accessibility Features for Mutter/GNOME Shell on Wayland by Oliver Fourdan: This work is very important. Oliver has made significant progress in shrinking the accessibility gap we currently have. Thanks for that!
  • Designing GNOME Mobile Apps by Tobias Bernard: Exciting work! It was great to see their progress on making GNOME apps adaptative. I hope this can make our platform even more attractive to vendors interested in building mobile OSes.
  • The Growth of GNOME by Neil McGovern: It is very reassuring listening to Neil describe the plans of growth for the GNOME Foundation.
  • Lightning Talks: It is always fun to see fellow GNOMies delivering their talk considering the lightning talks’ time constraint. 😀

During the BoF days, I conducted the Newcomers workshop, where we had various participants learning hands-on how to make their first code contribution to the GNOME project. Thanks everyone that showed up to participate and to help newcomers. I hope we can improve and repeat the workshop all over the world. GNOME.Asia will have its edition of the Newcomers workshop, so if you will be around in Gresik, don’t miss it!

In the Boxes BoF we discussed a roadmap to land some highly anticipated features such as UEFI support, Import/Export VMs, etc… Stay tuned here and also in the @BoxesGNOME Twitter account, where I have been doing outreach for our project by interacting with a part of our user base [wherever they are].

The social events were a blast. We had delicious food, great music, and passionate conversations at the Gala Dinner. The Picnic Day was fun and relaxing. The Museum BoF was enjoyable and nerdy (how I like it ;-)).

Checkout the photos!

Thanks to my employer, Red Hat, for sponsoring my trip and accommodation in the beautiful Thessaloniki!

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Newcomers workshop @ GUADEC 2019

This year’s GUADEC is approaching and I can already feel people’s excitement while talking about our annual conference.  It is important that we benefit from having so many GNOMies together in the same location to help the next generation to get started in our project. For this reason, we are planning a workshop during the first day of the BoFs (check our wiki page for more info).

The Newcomers Workshop aims at helping newcomers solve their first Gitlab issue. Historically, Carlos Soriano has championed the initiative (thank Carlos when you see him) and I have participated, guiding dozens of people in the universities here in Brno. In the past, other community members were organizing the workshop all over the world. We plan to expand the initiative by having even more GNOME contributors organizing similar events at a local level.

In the workshop we go step-by-step in the GNOME Newcomers Guide, making sure nobody gets stuck on anything.  As simple as that. The more GNOME developers participate the better, since we can benefit from their project-specific expertise.

The workshop is taking place on August 26th, and anybody interested in making their first contribution is welcome! Save the date!

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Summing up GUADEC 2018

That’s my seventh edition of GUADEC (and counting) and I just can’t get enough!

This year’s edition was once again a blast. The best opportunity to put faces into the names we interact daily throughout the communication channels of our community, and to meet new folk.

Once again a volunteer, this year a chaired the sessions in the auditorium during the first day, organized one of the newcomers activities, and the football game. Don’t forget to check out the conference photos.

Lots of work got done, as you must have read from other posts in Planet GNOME. It was no different for Boxes. Our annual Birds of a Feather session was more of a whole afternoon chat under the shadow in front of the university cafeteria. We managed to count with the presence of very experienced members of our community to give us some valuable insights on how we can sanely introduce new features and optimize the existing ones.

We discussed the challenges and possibilities of the OVF support, enabling us to Import and Export virtualization appliances allowing users to easily share their VMs with each other, and perform migrations and backups. That is work that has already started and will be partially shipped in 3.30, and later complemented in the next cycle.

There we often heard of feature requests for enhancements we already landed. Therefore justifying my recent work in the new machine assistant to make the “Download an OS” page, and remote connections more discoverable. Expect more work in this area, making it easier for users to find and benefit from features we already have, such as: bridged network, file sharing, clipboard integration, notifications passthrough, multiple brokers, etc…

Another relevant topic fairly discussed during our meeting was the  integration of Boxes into the Purism mobile development workflow as a simulator in which they could easily run their Flatpak bundles built with GNOME Builder.  Alberto Fanjul participated in the discussions describing their requirements and suggesting features. Expect some interesting work in this regard for our next development cycle.

A few more specific topics were discussed related to changes under the hood related to speeding up things and making some processes more fail-proof.

Boxes among other apps got stickers!

GUADEC was also an opportunity for me to meet our Google Summer of Code mentee Adi Manglik, and chat about his challenges adding Power consumption capabilities to GNOME Usage and of being a newcomer in our community.

I would like to thank the GUADEC organizers for hosting an amazing conference. The Social Events were great, from the sangria at the beach party to the guided tour to Alcazaba ending with a delightful party at the sunset with incredible flamenco dances, it is all fantastic with friends.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank my employer Red Hat for sponsoring my trip! I hope to see you all again very soon!

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Attending GUADEC!

Just passing by to say that I am looking forward to see you all later this week in Almeria. The conference program sounds very promising and the host city is looking outstanding.

We will be hosting a Boxes BoF during the July 9th afternoon, so make sure to swing by if you are interested on contributing to Boxes or have any questions/ideas to discuss.

Besides the normal talks schedule, I will be involved in organizing newcomers and sport activities. Stay tuned!

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GUADEC 2017

I haven’t been blogging much lately but I couldn’t miss this opportunity of telling you about GUADEC 2017 in the hope that it is going to encourage you to attend our next year edition in Almería, Spain.

Looking back at the six editions of GUADEC that I have attended so far, I can honestly say that we are getting better and better, edition after edition. You might disagree but it is quite clear to me that we are evolving in a very promising direction as a software project and as a community (despite the political turmoil that our world is under).

The GNOME Way has shined as a promising path towards a sustainable and progressive community, where “It is a rejection of technological elitism. It is an egalitarian version of openness” that enables us to move forward in an ethical way.

This way I can guarantee that your attendance is going to be not only a pleasant but enlightening experience.

GUADEC 2017 - Group photo
GUADEC 2017 – Group photo

In this edition, as always, we had an excellent selection of talks presented by our community members. It was extremely hard having to pick a talk when there were multiple ones happening simultaneously.

In the day one morning I was chairing the sessions at the Turing room (nice choice of names along side Hopper btw), which limited my attendance of talks happening in the Hopper room. But anyway I would have been experiencing FOMO if I would be chairing the other room instead. 😉

My personal highlights are “Please Use GNOME Web” by Michael Catanzaro, and Christian Hergert rocking as always in his “State of the Builder” address.  Later that day our former executive director Karen Sandler was keynoting “The Battle Over Our Technology” where once more Software Freedom was in the spotlight.

After the afternoon brake, I chaired the sessions in the Hopper room, which gave me the opportunity to be part of the monetization discussions related to GNOME Software and Flatpak, presented by Jorge Garcia and Richard Hughsie. The activities of this room were closed by Julita Inca giving her reports of her outreachy activities in Peru.

The whole conference day ended with our traditional Interns Lightning Talks. As someone who has been in the other side, I can tell who anxious one must feel of speaking in front of such a qualified audience. But the whole tension disappears in the air as soon as you see how receptive the GNOME community is to Newcomers and their projects.

At day two I attended Jussi Pakkanen talk about meson, since I have been personally porting projects that I maintain into the build system, convincing me even more that this is a right choice. Unfortunately Nirbheek Chauhan couldn’t come, I hope his health is better now.

Carlos Garnacho and Florian Müllner talked about the future of our Shell (and handled very well the questions. 😉

This day I also watched Federico share his experiences of porting librsvg to Rust, and Carlos Garnacho talk about the future of Tracker.

The main attraction of the day, IMO, was Jonathan Blandford’s “The History of GNOME” talk. If you’d have just 30 minutes to watch GUADEC talks, I would recommend this one. It was a zeitgeist of the last 20 years of our project/community with a good pinch of comedy and interaction with the living legends sitting in the audience.

Later everybody tied their ties to get serious for the AGM report. ☺

In the last conference day I skipped Philip’s JavaScript talk to see Jakub Steiner talking about transitions and try to imagine where he would fill drones in the slides. ☺

Continuing in the design world, I was at the audience of Tobias Bernard’s “Building interfaces from the future” as well. #Inspiring

Matthew Garrett (I’m a big fan btw) attended GUADEC to share with us his expertise in security. And after it I jumped to Tristan’s Buildstream talk in the other room.

After lunch I rushed into the conference room to see Tim Lunn talk about Ubuntu’s return to GNOME, since I have nothing but good hopes for both projects and mostly for the users of free desktops.

Peter Hutterer traveled a long distance to tell us about mice! :p Followed by the GitLab conversation which sounded like a very promising closure for all the debates that took place before in emails and forums.

I then hoped into the other room to watch Wim Taymans give a freestyle talk about his exciting experiments developing what we now call Pipewire. To end the activities in the Hopper room, Carlos Garnacho confessed the murder of GdkWindow in front of the audience.

The lightning talks were the cherry on top!

Other than the talks, we had social events which gathered us even closer by having beers and delicious food. A special highlight to the 20th anniversary party which was a fantastic surprise that got us all emotional and proud of our community.

During the Unconference days I took advantage of being a few meters apart from people that I work daily through the internet to have more discussions and insights about the stuff we hack on. I would like to thank Zeeshan Ali for the counselling regarding the future of Boxes.

All in all, I probably forgot to mention many other interactions and remarkable moments that I have experienced throughout the week in Manchester, but I guess you can figure everything else by reading all the other blog posts in Planet GNOME.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my employer Red Hat for sponsoring my trip and the GUADEC organizers for an awesome conference. See you all soon!

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GUADEC 2016

I have just returned from our annual users and developers conference. This years’ GUADEC has taken place in the lovely Karlsruhe, Germany. It once again was a fantastic opportunity to gather everyone who works pretty hard to make our desktop and platform the best out there. 🙂

Luckily I was able to attend the three core days of the conference and stay three more days for the Hackfests/BoFs. Speaking of that, I had a talk on GNOME Music which you can find online as a courtesy of the Chaos Computer Club Video Operation Center.

It was also a blast to be able to speak to Outreachy/GSoC interns, discuss diversity, and get up-to-date on what others have been hacking on lately. The local organizers and the volunteers made it sure that everything went by smoothly.

The atmosphere was fantastic and relaxed: picnic, social events, mini-pool, ice cream…

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Gtk+ BOF @ GUADEC 2016

I would like to thank my employer Red Hat for enabling me to be once again present in the conference and for sponsoring my trip. See you all next year! 😉

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See you in GUADEC!

Howdy! I am just passing by to say that I am attending GUADEC this year.

Our annual GNOME conference is taking place this year in Karlsruhe, Germany. I am going to be there from the beginning until the 17th of August speaking about GNOME Music in one of the core days, and later joining other contributors in our BoF/hackfest.

See you all there!

Going to GUADEC 2016

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Attending GUADEC 2014

It’s been one of the toughest semesters I’ve ever gone through. I’m writing my graduation thesis, working, watching the World Cup, and taking classes. Besides all of that, I’ve been working hard to finish my duties before the end of July because that’s when we are having GUADEC.

Everything is ready for GUADEC 2014 in Strasbourg, France.

I’m attending the Documents & Photos BoF. Also, I’d like to engage in some GNOME Music hacking as well. And last but not least, I will be revenging Brazil in our annual football match.

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation and the travel committee for sponsoring my trip.

gnome_foundation_sponsor

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Bye 2013! Happy 2014!

When a new year comes, it’s time to reflect (not regret) and set up new goals.

With this in mind, I have to say that last year was the best year ever… so far! I have attended FISL 14 in Porto Alegre, GUADEC in Czech Republic and gave a lot of talks. Speaking of that, I forgot to blog about the talk I gave at Latinoware which was an introduction to GNOME Application Development with Javascript (Gjs). And after that, I was invited to give a short introduction to Free Software and share my experiences as a student developing FOSS (mentioning my Google Summer of Code participation in 2012 and my involvement with the GNOME community) at my university. Everything was a blast!

For 2014, I want to intensify my GNOME contributions, read 50 books, graduate o/*, and (after that) find a first job. 😉

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GUADEC 2013

My journey starts by crossing the Atlantic Ocean and fighting its most dangerous threads. Basically monsters, dragons, and pirates. In Lisbon, Portugal, I have stepped ashore. My sailing days were over. However, my destiny was still far from being fulfilled. So I have sailed to Prague, Czech Republic. I got there in a few hours, but my luggage did not. Fortunately it magically appeared 24 hours after at the GUADEC dorms in Brno. :O

Fantastic literature apart, I have had an awesome time at GUADEC. Between August 1st and August 4th, we have had a special keynote every morning followed by a whole day of talks. Besides, we have had some parties in the evenings: in the very first day in a full-dedicated nightclub, and on day 3 at the local Starobrno brewery (generously funded by Mozilla).

From August 5th to 8th, BoFs and hackfests! I have spent some time working with the GNOME Music crew. Met the guys in-real-life and was introduced to new ones.

I could not forget to mention the blistering heat in Brno. It was hotter than my homeland hottest days. But the best way to soften the heat if you are in Czech Republic is by having a beer or even a Kofola (I had never drank it before. Loved it).

At last but not least, I want to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance at the conference. I hope to see you all fellow GNOMErs again next year, and to practice my french at GUADEC 2014 in Strasbourg!

gnome_foundation_sponsor