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!
