GUADEC in Thessaloniki was a great experience, as ever. Thank you once again to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendence!
Some personal highlights, in no particular order:
- A lot of useful and informative discussion at the GNOME Advisory Board meeting on Thursday – we ran out of time, which seems like a good sign.
- After Benjamin Berg and Iain Lane’s great talk on Managing GNOME Sessions with Systemd, Benjamin and I discussed the special-case they had to make to run GNOME Initial Setup’s “copy worker” early in the user session, and whether we might be able to improve this and various other aspects by launching Initial Setup in a different way.
- Via Matthias’ talk on Portals, I got thinking about the occasional requests for an “is this app installed?” portal, and I realised that you can actually fake it with existing machinery in some cases. If you care about a specific app, you probably want to be able to talk to it, so you specify --talk-name=org.example.Foo; at which point you can call org.freedesktop.DBus.ListActivatableNames() and check whether org.example.Foo is in the returned list.
- The Intern Lightning Talks were inspiring: it’s great to see what has caught the interest of new contributors. This year, I was inspired by Srestha Srivastava’s work on Boxes to send a merge request to osinfo-db to generate the necessary XML for Endless OS. This in turn led to a great discussion with Fabiano and Felipe, and to some more issues and merge requests.
- Alex Larsson was a tough act to follow at the lightning talks, but based on hallway discussion, my bit on Flatpak External Data Checker was of interest. (I taught it how to update appdata on the flight home. The person sitting next to me told me that writing code on flights is a young-person thing, which I took as a compliment.)
- Not one, but two talks on user testing! One thing I took away is that while it’s possible to conduct remote usability testing, you’ll miss out on body language cues from the test subjects, and in the specific case of GNOME you’ll either bias the sample towards people who already use GNOME, or you’ll introduce the additional variable of whatever remote access tool the user uses. Not ideal!
On the Endless front, the launch of the Coding Education Challenge, and the various talks from my esteemed colleagues about varied activities, were all great to see.
There were lots of clashes for me, so I’m grateful to the AV team for their great work on recording all the talks. (Unfortunately, one of the talks I couldn’t make it to, on GDPR, was not recorded, to avoid distributing what could be construed as legal advice. Alas!) Many thanks to the local team and the GNOME Foundation staff and volunteers who made the event run so smoothly.