¿ 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

Public Announcements

GNOME 3 in Paris

Thanks to YoBoY, there will be a GNOME 3 release party in Paris. It will happen on Friday, April 8th, registration is mandatory, and the number of available seats is limited, so register now for the party! There will be some GNOME 3 goodies ;)


Summer of Code

If you are a student, you can now apply for this year Google Summer of Code! GNOME is a mentoring organization this year again, this means you can be paid to hack on GNOME for a whole summer. Just browse our list of ideas for potential projects, or you can just write a proposal for any idea that you care about and would make GNOME even cooler!


Personal Life

I'm really happy to announce that I've started working at Red Hat last week. I have joined the Spice team and I'm looking forward to do great stuff (take over the world, this kind of things ;) with the people working there. Hopefully I'll get my own red hat soon!

GNOME and GSoC 2011

We just got the great news that GNOME got accepted to be part of Google Summer of Code 2011. This is a great opportunity for GNOME, thanks again to Google for organizing this!

The bad news is that the work is just starting for everyone :) We are looking for cool ideas for students to work on during the summer, so if you are working on a GNOME project and have ideas that would make a nice 3 months coding project for a student, please add it to our idea page.

We'll also need mentors for all the students that will have fun hacking on GNOME during the summer, you can already register to be a mentor for GNOME on melange, don't wait, register now :)

Last but not least, if you are a student, be sure to check our ideas list and our information page for students. For now it's preliminary, the ideas will be sorted in the coming week. And you don't have to limit yourself to these ideas, you can also come up with your own cool idea and describe it in your application on Google website. The application period for students hasn't opened yet, it will open in about 10 days for now. However, you can already start thinking about what project you'd like to work on, start playing with the code of the project you'd like to work on during the summer, start discussing about your idea and your application with people involved in the project, ... Remember that in the previous years, we required candidates to show us a patch they had written for a free software project, and it's really likely that we'll do the same this year. You can also drop by on #soc on irc.gnome.org if you have specific questions!

All in all, it should be a fun summer! :)