Was last week for 4 days in Adeje, in the Canary Islands, for an event organized by the Universidad de La Laguna with talks and workshops about Free Software.
Since I had only two mornings scheduled, I took 3 days of vacation in order to have a mini holiday. “Unfortunately”, Yolanda had found a job the week before (in the Diario de Noticias, a local newspaper, yay!), so she couldn’t come with me. Fortunately, the people I met there (included Grex, who I hadn’t seen for a couple of years) were really nice, so I had cool people to hang around with.
So, on Thursday, I did a workshop on GTK programming. I couldn’t teach too much, since there were only 2 hours and there were a few people that didn’t even know C, so I had to lose some time explaining basic things, like what “int main (int argc, char *argv[])” means. It was a pity, not for me, but for the people that had a good knowledge of Linux/C/GNOME, that wanted the workshop to be much more advanced than what it was. I had, at the end of the workshop, to evaluate the students on an exercise (completing the GUI for a simple text editor I wrote while explaining). Since there was little time left, people were not able to write much code, so I just looked at whether they were trying to use the correct functions. The result of that was that everyone but 2 people passed, and those 2 did not pass because they both told me they had understood nothing, and it wouldn’t have been morally correct to have them pass. I think I wouldn’t be a good teacher, since I was a bit sad of not having those 2 people pass and even trying for a few seconds to find an excuse to have them pass.
The second day there was, as the closing session for the event, a BOF about advantages and disadvantages of Free Software. Before that, Teresa, one of the organizers, and Sociology teacher at the University, had given a talk about Free Software and society, which turned up to be splendid. During this BOF, a guy (whose name I don’t remember) said that one of the bad things about Free Software was lack of documentation, with “the exception of GNOME, which is very well documented”. Of course, I thought I was dreaming, and offered him a beer for saying that. What he meant was that he had found Devhelp (which I told them to install during my workshop) a very good piece of software. And I think he was right, only on that though, because, as we all know, we lack a lot of documentation, specially step-by-step tutorials for beginners. So, this means that once we get those tutorials written, accompanied with the cool API documentation in Devhelp (and its search feature, which simply rocks), we should be able to say we’re fully documented.
Apart from the talks, very nice to hang around with Teresa, René (and Marina, his girlfriend) and the other guys. A pity I forgot to bring my camera, because there were very nice landscapes to take a photo of, like the Teide (the highest peak in Spain), which I saw from the plane in an incredible view, or the sunsets from the beach. Anyway, I hope to come back to the islands again.