Another year, another GUADEC. This was the 25th anniversary of the first GUADEC, and the 25th one I’ve gone to. Although there have been multiple bids for Italy during the past quarter century, this was the first successful one. It was definitely worth the wait, as it was one of the best GUADECs in recent memory.
This was an extremely smooth conference — way smoother than previous years. The staff and volunteers really came through in a big way and did heroic work! I watched Deepesha, Asmit, Aryan, Maria, Zana, Kristi, Anisa, and especially Pietro all running around making this conference happen. I’m super grateful for their continued hard work in the project. GNOME couldn’t happen without their effort.
Favorite Talks
I commented on some talks as they happened (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3). I could only attend one track at a time so missed a lot of them, but the talks I saw were fabulous. They were much higher quality than usual this year, and I’m really impressed at this community’s creativity and knowledge. As I said, it really was a strong conference.
I did an informal poll of assorted attendees I ran into on the streets of Brescia on the last night, asking what their favorite talks were. Here are the results:
- Emmanuele’s talk on “Getting Things Done In GNOME”: This talk clearly struck a chord amongst attendees. He proposed a path forward on the technical governance of the project. It also had a “Wither Maintainers” slide that lead to a lot of great conversations.
- George’s talk on streaming: This was very personal, very brave, and extremely inspiring. I left the talk wanting to try my hand at live streaming my coding sessions, and I’m not the only one.
- The poop talk, by Niels: This was a very entertaining lightning talk with a really important message at the end.
- Enhancing Screen Reader Functionality in Modern Gnome by Lukas: Unfortunately, I was at the other track when this one happened so I don’t know much about it. I’ll have to go back and watch it! That being said, it was so inspiring to see how many people at GUADEC were working on accessibility, and how much progress has been made across the board. I’m in awe of everyone that works in this space.
Honorable mentions
- Emmanuele on Fixing GObject: This was an unexpected talk. He started by proposing something pretty outlandish, and by the end of the talk it seemed not only plausible, but likely.
- Logan’s lightning talk about writing apps using GTK Inspector: Just plain fun.
- Martin’s BOF on Gameeky: Totally unhinged, totally out of control, totally entertaining. I have no idea what this game’s final form will be, but I’m enjoying watching it evolve.
- Florian on hacking the shell: This presented a nice setup to make it easier to develop against the shell. Given how important extensions are to our ecosystem, this could help a lot.
In reality, there were many amazing talks beyond the ones I listed. I highly recommend you go back and see them. I know I’m planning on it!
Crosswords at GUADEC
We didn’t have a Crosswords update talk this cycle. However we still had some appearances worth mentioning:
- Federico gave a talk about how to use unidirectional programming to add tests to your application, and used Crosswords as his example. This probably the 5th time one of the two of us have talked about this topic. This was the best one to date, though we keep giving it because we don’t think we’ve gotten the explanation right. It’s a complex architectural change which has a lot of nuance, and is hard for us to explain succinctly. Nevertheless, we keep trying, as we see how this could lead to a big revolution in the quality of GNOME applications. Crosswords is pushing 80KLOC, and this architecture is the only thing allowing us to keep it at a reasonable quality.
- People keep thinking this is “just” MVC, or a minor variation thereof, but it’s different enough that it requires a new mindset, a disciplined approach, and a good data model. As an added twist, Federico sent an MR to GNOME Calendar to add initial unidirectional support to that application. If crosswords are too obscure a subject for you, then maybe the calendar section of the talk will help you understand it.
- I gave a lighting talk about some of the awesome work that our GSoC (and prospective GSoC) students are doing.
- I gave a BOF on Words. It was lightly attended, but led to a good conversation with the always-helpful Martin.
- Finally, I sat down with Tobias to do a UX review of the crossword game, with an eye to getting it into GNOME Circle. This has been in the works for a long-time and I’m really grateful for the chance to do it in person. We identified many papercuts to fix of course, but Tobias was also able to provide a suggestion to improve a long-standing problem with the interface. We sketched out a potential redesign that I’m really happy with. I hope the Circle team is able to continue to do reviews across the GNOME ecosystem as it provides so much value.
Personal
A final comment: I’m reminded again of how much of a family the GNOME community is. For personal reasons, it was a very tough GUADEC for Zana and I. It was objectively a fabulous GUADEC and we really wanted to enjoy it, but couldn’t. We’re humbled at the support and love this community is capable of. Thank you.