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.

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!