GNOME.Asia 2018

GNOME.Asia 2018 was co-hosted with COSCUP and openSUSE Asia this year in Taipei, Taiwan. It was a good success and I enjoyed it a lot. Besides, meeting old friends and making new ones are always great.

Talks

  • Desktop applications: life inside a sandbox — David King

Flatpak, as you all know, is quite popular and useful these days. So it’s good to know some implementation details from this talk.

  • Introducing Team Silverblue — Matthias Clasen

As Matthias mentioned in his talk, it’s his first time to give this talk. And I think it was quite a success. It’s a new variant of Fedora Workstation and it provides the excellent support to container-based workflows.

  • The future of the computer classrooms – GNOME inside — Eric Sun

I have to say I enjoyed this talk the most in the conference. Eric used ezgo Linux as an example and explained some interesting ideas, which blows my mind. When we were young and in the computer class, we were taught to use Microsoft Office, Photoshop, etc. All these are . And these software are gonna be the the top options when you are thinking about choosing a office/picture editing software.

  • There are more, but I can’t include them all

Socials

  • The welcom party was held at a bar near Taipei 101. The bar has a open platform, where you have a great view, which is pretty good. You can find beer, food and of course friends there.
  • We had a one-day tour to Taipei Palace Museum and Taipei 101 the day after the conference. We had various dumplings and some delicious food for lunch at Din Tai Fung(A top restaurant at 101 where you need queue around 90 mins even at weekday). It was well organized. And a big thank you for Max 🙂

Finally

Thanks Max for all the effort making this conference happen. Thanks GNOME Foundation for Sponsorship my trip to the conference.

GUADEC 2018

It’s been a few weeks after I got back from GUADEC 2018, which was hosted in Almeria, Spain. And I finally manage to find some time to write this blog.

First Impression

It’s my first time to Spain. And my first impression is that it’s hot here. I arrived at Malaga Airport around 13:30. The moment I stepped out of the airport, I thought: WOW, this is as hot as Beijing. But it turns out Almeria is a lot better. Cheers!

After around 20-hour flight(4-hour layover at CDG), I felt very tired. And another 3.5-hour bus was waiting for me. Unexpectedly, the scenary along the coastline kept me awake all the time. It IS very beautiful. And it’s definitely worthwhile flying to Malaga and take the bus to Almeria.

Talks

Talks I enjoyed are:

  • GTK4 Lighting Talks – It’s good the know how things are going in GTK+4, and I’m looking forward to using it.
  • GNOME Foundation: Looking into the Future – GNOME is expanding! Existing things are ahead!
  • Migrating from JHBuild to BuildStream – I’m been using jhbuild since I started to contribute to GNOME (in 2014). It’s done its job well, but sometimes it’s painful to use as well. I tried BuildStream a few months ago, it was good except that applications built using it doesn’t have access to your local filesystem(sandboxed in another word). It makes Logs basically useless, and I’m still using the old-fashion JHBuild.
  • Intern and Newcomer Lighting Talks – It’s always good to see new contributors in GUADEC. And hope they stay contributing to GNOME after GSoC.

BOF

I participated gitlab CI/CD BOF and Settings BOF. Settings BOF was really productive. We has lots discussions and came up some TODOs. I’ll start working on cleaning up codes in network panel to separate UI code and backend code interacting with NM.

Social Events

Various social events make GUADEC my favourite conference. Castle tour and Flamenco show were my top 2 picks. Emm, wait. Beach party make it to top 3 as well. I enjoyed it a lot, although I can’t swim. It definitely encourages me to learn to swim.

Here are some photos

In the end, I’d like to thank GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip and my employer SUSE for sponsoring my time.

GNOME.Asia 2017

GNOME.Asia 2017 was held in ChongQing, China. It is my first time to ChongQing, and I like it very much in many aspects. The city is built around mountains, so the there are lots of roads that are not straight, which is completely different with the roads in Beijing. There are lots of ups and downs, too. That’s why you can barely see someone riding a bike there. It can be dangerous and tiring, too. Besides, there are lots of overpasses, which makes the city more 3D. The city is also built along the Yangzi River, so you can see many bridges(like London, I think). Here are some photos of the city:

Back to the conference. I really like the keynote titled “The Future of GNOME is You” given by Nuritzi. It tells the students that they can make impact on what the future of GNOME is by starting to contribute. It’s also a goal of GNOME.Asia. That’s to try to get more people involved in GNOME/open source.

I gave a lighting talk in the first afternoon. It was about Google Summer of Code. In China, not many university students know about this project. I applied it in 2015 and I learned a lot from the whole process. It was an amazing experience, so I hope more students know it and apply it.

The conference is really a success and I have to thank those local organizers, volunteers and everyone who make it happen.

Here are some random photos from this trip. Enjoy.

Thanks GNOME Foundation for supporting my trip and my employer SUSE for my time and this trip.

Going to GNOME.Asia 2017

I’m going to GNOME.Asia 2017, which is gonna be held in ChongQing, China during 14-16th Oct. 2017.

I’m at Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital International Airport, waiting to board the plane to ChongQing, China. To be honest, I’m really exited about this trip. I’ve never been to ChongQing before. So visiting the city and eat hotpot is will be a lot of fun. 🙂

See you in ChongQing.

GUADEC 2017

It’s been a full month since GUADEC, and I’m just starting to get this blog post completed from my TODO list. 🙂

GUADEC 2017 was held in Manchester, UK. I was really exited about it, because UK is a country that I was looking forward to paying a visit to.

Conference

We had a great selection of talks this year for GUADEC, and I enjoyed the ones I attended a lot. Here are a few of them worth mentioning here:

  • The GNOME Way by Allan Day – We’re principled.
  • The History of GNOME by Jonathan Blandford – In GNOME’s 20th year, it’s good to look back what we’ve done in the past 20 years and know the history.
  • Please use GNOME Web by Michael Catanzaro – Actually I missed this talk that day. But I did viewed it online when I arrived home. I was a chrome user, I enjoyed Google account sync and those plugins a lot. I did tried GNOME Web a few months ago, I missed those chrome feature a lot and I switched back to chrome. But this time, I was hugely surprised by the overall experience that GNOME Web provides. As it mentions in the wiki, it provides a simple, clean, beautiful view of the web. And I can’t agree more. It does its job well.
  • Resurrecting dinosaurs, what can possibly go wrong – It’s good to see such a talk and it makes me think.
  • Newcomer Genesis Evolution by Carlos Soriano and Bastian Ilsø – In 2014, it was the GNOME Love project that helped me getting started with GNOME. It just worked for me. It’s rather important for a community to attract more newcomers and get them involved. So I’m glad to see Carlos and Bastian are working hard on this to make newcomers’ life much easier.
  • Payments and donations in GNOME Software by Richard Hughes – It seems a small feature of GNOME Software, but Richard mentioned lots of concerns he met while working on it. It was a good discussion overall.
  • Lighting Talk – Lighting talk is always a lot of fun.

Unconference

I like the Unconference Days as usual. It provides a chance for hackers to gather together to get something done. And it can be very productive. I discussed some issues of Logs with David and investigated an issue of PK’s zypp backend. I also joined the hiking to Peak District National Park. The view is absolutely gorgeous and I enjoyed it a lot.

Social Events

As usual, we had lots of social events this year, which is always good. I enjoyed the 20th birthday party the most. It’s great that we have a chance to party together celebrating we’ve accomplished as a whole.

Here are some pictures, enjoy 🙂

In the end, I’d like to thank GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my accommodation during GUADEC and my employer SUSE for sponsoring my time and this trip. And much thanks to the GUADEC team and everyone else to make it happen.