A Tale of Two Conferences

I spent the week in humid, rainy Berlin for the Desktop Summit. I particularly enjoyed Sunday’s keynotes by Claire Rowland and Nick Richards, not to mention the many great talks and discussions. It’s always fun to catch up with old friends (not to mention my coworkers at Collabora, very few of whom I see regularly), and to meet some new (to me, at least) faces, including João Paulo, whose Summer of Code project—implementing OTR in Telepathy—I have the pleasure of mentoring. I gave a talk of my very own, which apparently is one of the few videos available so far. I haven’t dared watch it yet. 😉 I hope to make the promised new release of Bustle this coming week.

Later in the week, the BoFs on D-Bus and on GNOME IM integration were both very productive. Hylke and Andreas’s input was very useful in the latter, as was the presence of David and George of KDE-Telepathy fame: they’re solving (and hitting) a lot of the same issues as are found in GNOME, so we had some true cross-desktop pooling of ideas and solutions. Thanks to everyone!

The passport queue at Stansted

The journey back on Friday evening was smooth—at least until we hit Stansted, where of course there was an inexplicable zoo of thousands of travellers queueing for passport control. (Not pictured: the thousands more behind me.) And of course, what better to do after a week at a conference than to attend another two-day hackathon at Homerton

Desktop Summit and CamHac Lanyards

CamHac is the first Haskell hackathon I’ve attended. It’s a very welcoming community, full of interesting people and projects. I swapped Vim tips, shoulder-surfed some of the internals of GHCi, chatted about open data and web server frameworks with some Silk folks, learnt about the internals of fast output stream libraries, and otherwise hacked on a long-dormant GObject introspection-based binding generator. It took a while for me to catch up with Daf’s work to date; I warmed up by generating code for enums and flags, and then started reworking the code generator to use haskell-src-exts’s AST and pretty-printer. Interesting stuff.