GUADEC 2015

GUADEC:

• GUADEC often conflicts with things. This year I could only attend until Sunday.
• At least one talk is a rehash of previous year talk. Lots of ideas, but to be honest the diff vs last year is small. This while the room is quite packed and willing to act.
• Flew back while arriving at airport 19min before departure. Still made it. Don’t try this!
• I attended way more talks than I thought I would. Sometimes realized too late I should’ve gone to the other talk
• Number of attendees is damn low (140 IIRC)
• I can be more aggressive in real life than on the internet and did that twice unfortunately.
• I prefer standing tables for better mingling
• For many years I’ve stopped bringing anything devices to a conference aside from a phone. We rely way too much on things that won’t work on a phone. E.g. usage of IRC and mailing lists. Where are my notifications?

Gothenburg/Sweden:

• Gothenburg is expensive. Food, drinks (even coffee), public transport, entrance fees to dancing places, etc.
• You can easily get by without cash. Just relying on a debit/bank card is enough. Almost all places accept cards or flat-out refuse cash.
• Really friendly atmosphere. I messed around while cycling and every car was really patient.
• Because English is a foreign language for me as well, I never bother to ask if anyone speaks it. The result is like being in France, but then the opposite.
• Cycle paths can be found on the left, or maybe on the right or maybe in the middle. Sometimes it might look like the pedestrian path. Really confusing. Some roads lack cycle paths. Really not obvious!
• Cycling can cost you as little as 25 SEK for 3 days (keep each ride under 30min). Public transport is 26 SEK for one trip.
• I really wonder about the average salary. Lots of people get really drunk so I assume they make enough money.
• I’m known for wearing way less clothes than others. 95% of Swedish people wore less than I did. I did not want nor appreciate this reality check.

People:

• Nuritzi remembered the names of 8 people within a day or so. She gave a talk; thanks to the schedule I was able to lookup her name. Remembering names is difficult.
• Found at least one person who shares my love to be able to argue intensely without considering it personal
• Documentation team is a fun group.
• Apologies to André for making him cycle. Plus when I made him cycle again. And again.
• My roommate slept happily under a Hello Kitty blanket 😀 (not his; apartment had it).
• André+me held a Vodka vs Whiskey content. I won despite magpie’s rants about it not being real whiskey. Seemed like people felt obliged to talk
• An surprising amount of people didn’t want stroopwafels. I take these with me sometimes on business trips and they’re usually insanely popular. I demand an inquiry!
• Three (“four” arrived early) days is not enough to speak to everyone I’d like to talk to
• Some Czech people are damn tall.

GNOME:

• We should really be doing usability research/testing. This is long overdue.
• I don’t get why it’s totally acceptable for one person to only posts almost solely offtopic stuff to foundation-list. This has driven people off foundation-list and has derailed various threads. Wtf. Just because there might be a backlash. Wtf. Either be ontopic, the rest should be in a private message. I really hate this special treatment. Yeah, this is about RMS. Isn’t it our resources?
  FWIW, I wanted to post a warning to the last offtopic msg, but thought to check with board. By the time I got the “decide yourself” (IIRC) it was sort of too late. Don’t even get me started about the “just ignore it”. Apparently he’s a still a foundation member because when GNOME started he helped Miguel. Miguel is not a current member. FWIW, I appreciate that he educates people, my peeve not about this.
• Code of Conduct should hopefully apply to just everything hosted by GNOME if board agrees. Basically the admin first decides, then board is there for escalation (this reflects how various people have been doing things).
• Dashboard/KPI for GNOME would be nice. I have gained loads of experience on this but not sure if there’s any free software available for this which works in the way that I think is best.
  Basically: Rough indicators are better than exact filters. Speed and ease of use is way more important than if being able to drill down or analyse every detail of a measure/KPI.
• Current Red Hat seems a little bit strange and different/changing from the past. Appears to be the result of high growth and success. Hope CEO can do a cross check because really seems like the focus is off in some areas. Need more companies with similar success/influence as Red Hat.
• GTK+ apparently again lacks Windows love. Every so often we do another call for people and seems like we need to do that again.
• Wayland probably wont work nicely until next GNOME (I might be wrong here!). Focus is currently on other things than fixing the various paper cuts.
• Was sort of asked to help out/join with writing documentation. I did help out with various release notes (though often was re-written after my work), but documentation seems a bit out of my comfort zone. Seems interesting to try but not on my own.