Back from DAM3

December 11, 2006 1:20 pm Dave Neary gnome, wengo

I got home from Portland yesterday afternoon – I’m really starting to feel the jet-lag now. It’s only the second time I’ve had that much of a difference in time-zones, and I’m currently a time-zombie.

I’ve had a chance to reflect on the last few days, and have come to a conclusion. It was good, but not great. We had some more break-outs on Friday, and I had some great out-of-band conversations with people I’ll definitely be hooking up with very soon.

In no particular order, here are a few things I noted during the conference:

  • The Wall of Laptops is evil in this kind of meeting
  • Quim Gil said to me last GUADEC that there’s a Spanish saying that all work should be done with food on the table (or something like that) – and I can confirm that most of the valuable connections were made during breakfast, coffee breaks, and dinner & drinks
  • The presentations should really have been 5 minutes per project – 10 minutes max – self-censorship was sorely missing
  • It was a pity that we were missing some projects which made it difficult to make good headway on some issues – we discussed packaging and installing 3rd party software and improving upstream/downstream co-operation, but most of the distributions weren’t well represented, for example
  • I was sorry Aaron Seigo didn’t make it
  • I am hugely optimistic about audio after the audio session – perhaps inappropriately. We’ll see
  • A couple of the break-out sessions were unfortunately rat-holes – there was no real resolution possible (at least, with the participants involved) – talking about DRM and codecs support for example was depressing

I was also involved in a discussion about what we need for ISD documentation, which was pretty aligned with what people have been saying around GNOME – we need to focus more on tutorials and coherent developer stories, rather than API docs (which are pretty good). Someone coming to GNOME should have access to code snippets showing how to use the APIs for more complex tasks. And we should have a book on GNOME development.

2 Responses

  1. Ronald S. Bultje Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 12:29 am

    I read your last blog post, but am still interested in the audio thing. Is there a detailed write-up of what was promised/decided and how that differs from previous meetings?

    As for the book, can’t someone update Havoc’s GNOME 2.0 programming book? It’s “free as in freedom”, IIRC.

  2. Dave Neary Says:
    December 12th, 2006 at 12:45 am

    Hi Ronald,

    I’ll write up my notes when I get a chance, but the proposal is essentially what I wrote – first, get relevant people together. Then, work on usecases. Then, figure out a sane plan of action. Then, do it. Then, profit.

    Easy peasy 🙂

    As for the book, I think there’s tons of great material on dgo that we need to edit, and bring together in a coherent format to benefit ISDs.

    And sure, updating Havoc’s book is a possibility.