Viva Chile!
Back from Chile yesterday, where I had a really great time. The people
there are just fabulous, they are very kind and they treated us, speakers,
as kings.
Actually getting to Talca, where the conferences were taking place, was the only bad
thing, since it took like 26 hours from my mother’s in Madrid to the hotel in Talca.
Although I expended like 3 hours running with the baggage, drinking beer and eating
in Santiago, with Alejandro, his wife and Ednilson. In the arrival to Santiago, you
can see the Andes mountain range, which is awesome:
Then, in Talca, met a lot of very nice people, from the organizers (Jorge, Alejandro)
to the attendees, where there were really young people, fresh blood for GNOME
(since I think Federico and I convinced them to hack on GNOME :-). Also met again
my friend Germán,
who seems to be the reference in Chile for Free Software.
First day of the congress was about political talks, with the people from the Chilean
customs, people from La Junta de Extremadura (making the number of Spanish people in
the congress to 3), and, in the afternoon, Federico’s talk about GNOME (with a very nice
tribute
to Chema (we knew the tragic news that same day in the morning, and it was
a bit of a shock)). After Federico’s talk, I gave mine about Mono,
and it seems it interested many people, so there will hopefully be more developers
coming from Chile.
The second day, Federico and I had a room for the whole day, so we talked about various things.
I opened the day talking
about GNOME-DB and I succeeded in making the people from
Galilea (a local Real Estate
Company that is developing a GPL ERP for themselves) interested in it. Then Federico talked
about the GNOME Canvas (please Federico post the slides :-), with very nice sample code. After
lunch, I talked about CORBA
in GNOME. It was maybe a bit too advanced for the people there, since the questions
I asked to give away t-shirts (Federico had brought Ximian t-shirts which we were giving away
to people answering the questions we asked at the end of the talks) were answered
not as quick as in the other talks. Then Federico replaced
his Drag&Drop; talk with an interactive session, where people asked questions about
anything related with helping GNOME. So, he talked about translations, documentation, GTK,
etc, making the talk the best in the congress (in my opinion).
Last day, before getting the bus to Santiago airport, Fernando (from Galilea) drove us to
San Javier, a village near Talca where there are plenty of vineyards. He brought us
(Federico, Oralia, Tim Ney and myself) to Balduzzi vineyards, where we bought some wine
to bring it home.
So, a really nice trip, and in fact, the most productive congress besides GUADEC that I’ve
ever attended. I just look forward to attend next year.
All photos here.