It’s already a month since we were in Spain for GUADEC and I still haven’t gotten around to writing something, so before I completely forget here are a few quick impressions and photos!
Local-First
Similar to last year, my main focus was on local-first, since that’s what I’ve mostly been working on recently. Julian and I gave a talk about Reflection and the p2panda-gobject bindings, and more generally plans for making local-first sync part of the GNOME developer platform.
We also had a local-first BoF to discuss system integration on Sunday, and a p2panda-goject workshop on Monday where we prototyped the Migrations app Jakub designed. Both were really well-attended, and it was super cool to see people starting to prototype their own little experiments that sync, including a collaborative Snake game, and a collaborative drawing app.
Our current thinking around system integration is that we wan to have two separate portals: one for Contacts, which would just manage P2P identities (so apps don’t have to each have their own identity system and contacts management), and a second one that actually syncs data on behalf of apps using a system API. For the former there is already a relatively detailed plan (see the talk linked above), and this will be prototyped as part of a p2panda NLnet grant.
This entire area is of course still experimental so all plans are subject to change, but it’s exciting to see things get more and more concrete over the past year.
Talks
Some of my favorite talks:
- Session Save/Restore by Adrian Vovk: Really cool to see the progress in this area, but also incredible how many moving parts are involved in getting this to just work™. Kudos to Adrian and everyone else who’s helping to push this forward!
- Foundation Annual General Meeting by Allan Day: Really clear and concise overview of where the Foundation is at, what changes have been made to make it more financially sustainable, and what challenges still persist. The fellowship in particular is a very nice, tangible new thing and at least to me a sign that some things have changed for the better. I found this framing particularly interesting: the Foundation is a corporation, and the AGM is a meeting for “shareholders”, i.e. people who invest their time (rather than their money) in the Foundation, to assess whether the investment is well managed.
- The Future of Boxes by Felipe Borges: I’m very happy to see Boxes revived and modernized, it’s a secret gem of our app ecosystem. Kudos to Felipe for his work on this!
- A Brief History of Graphs by Sjoerd Stendahl: Very nice talk, and a great success story for how programs focused on the third-party app ecosystem like Circle can help to bring people into the community.
- GNOME OS Mobile lightning talk by Aberrahim Kitouni: Between this and the Mobile BoF it was very nice to see more people across the community pushing towards making mobile an official part of the GNOME release process.
City and Venue
The logistics of constantly going back and forth between the Rialta dorms, the University building, and the city center made the social side of the conference more difficult than in other years, especially because public transit stopped relatively early in the evening. As usual, the smart move would probably have been to stay in the city center, but that only goes so far if everyone else is staying at the official accommodation, which is far away. More generally, the A Coruña city center was cute, but other parts of the city felt really car-centric and not very fun to be in.
Meta
I found it a bit sad that once again, we didn’t manage to use the fact that so many people were together in person to make progress on resolving the conflicts of the past few years. I didn’t see it as my responsibility to take care of this, and I assume everyone else felt the same way. But here’s an idea for next year: An official “Conflict Resolution BoF”, chaired by a trained mediator.
If there’s any interest I’d be happy to co-organize something like this, but I wouldn’t want to be solely responsible for it.
More Photos
See you next year!