Monthly Archives: August 2013

Back from GUADEC 2013

This year, the annual GNOME Users and Developers European Conference was held in Brno. It is a beautiful city and the second largest in Czech Republic, with a lot of history and plenty of activities going on.

The conference venue was provided by the Brno University of Technology and was at a campus that had been converted from a Cartesian monastery, dating back to the 14th century. Take a look at the beautiful courtyard:

Courtyard at the venue. Photo by Ana Rey, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Courtyard at the venue. Photo by Ana Rey, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

There was a lot going on and not just talks; the hallway discussions that took place in between the talks and continued at pubs afterwards were perhaps even more important. And after the 4 core days of the conference were over, we had another 4 days of hackfests where we got plenty of stuff done.

My personal highlights included:

  • The System Settings hackfest where we discussed the upcoming gnome-control-center and gnome-system-settings changes. I presented my work on the Date & Time and received plenty of feedback and ideas how to further improve things.
  • Being able to meet face to face with System Settings developers and designers, and also with people I knew from the Fedora community.
  • Attending to Stef Walter’s ‘More secure with less “security”‘ talk. If you weren’t able to attend it, I would highly recommend watching the video recording at http://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/more-secure-with-less-security
  • Getting my GtkListBox patches merged in Glade git master and having a live hacking session together with Tristan.
  • Seeing the number of new contributors and how enthusiastic everybody was. Really hoping they all stick around!

Looking forward to Strasbourg 2014!

And last, but not least: thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travels!

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At my first GUADEC

I have been around GNOME and Fedora for a while, but haven’t been to any of the conferences before. Up until now!

Arrived at Brno yesterday and met up with other friendly Gnomies. It’s really nice to be able to meet people I only know from IRC face to face. Anyone I haven’t met yet, come and say hi!

Today is the official first day of GUADEC 2013. At 9 am Ethan Lee gave a keynote from a game developer’s perspective andĀ  now start the rest of the talks. Looking forward to the next 8 days. Big thanks to the local team for making things runĀ  smoothly!

P.S. And anyone who reads this and is NOT at GUADEC, be sure to come next year. It really is a lot of fun!

 

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