¿ Qué estabas haciendo ?

9 years after my first and only GUADEC, I've finally been able to go back to GUADEC, and guess what? It was amazing to be there!

This was a great opportunity to meet plenty of people I only knew from IRC, in particular seb128 whom I have known for 10 years and never met. And let's not forget all our amazing interns from the OPW and GSoC programs, this was very refreshing to see how enthusiastic they all were about GUADEC.

Quick memory drop of the main highlights for this week :

• Lots of tapas, Estrella Galicia and beach ;)

• Summer evenings in A Coruña can get cold, don't forget to take some kind of sweater with you when you travel there!
• In the end, I've done a lot more talking with people in the lobby and sitting in the sunny grass than actual talk attendance
• It's getting harder and harder to keep the existence of the French cabal secret, we'll have to do something about this!
• Huge kudos to the organizers, everything was perfectly organized, network was great (save for the unexpected flood ;), and also thanks to the sponsors for the various parties and for making that event possible

 As for the talks, here are the things I've done/attended during this week:

• I've been to Nathan Willis "How to fix a font" talk, interesting overview of various font issues. He was also looking for ways to get native speakers feedback since he is sometimes designing cyrillic fonts, and it can be hard to know what looks good or not. One possible way of achieving this would be to get the various GNOME language teams involved
• Zeeshan made a presentation about GNOME Boxes, cool as usual, but he could have done better on the photos of me he used ;)
• Marc-André and I gave a talk about building Windows applications from your linux application using MinGW, attendance was on the low side (about 15 people), but everyone seemed very interested in building for Windows. Quick spoiler for the talk: mingw32-configure && make -j4, all the other gory details can be found in our slides
• Together with some members of the French cabal GNOME-fr, I attended a meeting with the board to defend a Strasbourg bid for GUADEC 2013, it was more of a session to discuss about the most important items to have in the bid rather than an actual defence, I summed up my notes in a (French) email. Now we've got work to do :)
• We also had a 2 hour meeting about GNOME Boxes design. Marc-André, Zeeshan and Jonathan were present as well as our designers (Jakub and Jon), our Summer of Code students, Fidêncio and Jovanka, and other members of the SPICE team (Alon and Hans). This was a pretty productive meeting where we could go over the various small issues in Boxes design that were uncovered during development, and discuss with the designers how to best fix them
• Last but not least, on Sunday all the GSoC and OPW interns who could attend GUADEC gave lightning talks to present their work. All the talks went well, and some very cool stuff was presented. It was just great to meet all these new heads and to feel all this energy around GNOME and free software

Fidêncio and Jovanka giving their lightning talks

All in all, this GUADEC was a wonderful experience, I'm very happy to have been there. See you all next year! Hopefully in Strasbourg ;)

The last 3 photos in this post were taken by Ana Rey and are shared under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence