Wrapping up GUADEC 2017

I’m now back home after attending GUADEC 2017 in Manchester, followed by a week of half-vacation traveling around the Netherlands and visiting old friends. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet others in the GNOME community once again; having gone to a few hackfests and conferences in the past two years, I now recognize many friendly faces that I am happy to get a chance to see from time to time.

Talks

Here’s what I attended during the conference; I’ll link to the videos and provide a sentence or two of commentary.

• The GNOME Way, Allan Day (video) — for me, one of the two highlights of the conference, a great statement of what makes GNOME tick, and a great opener for its 20th birthday.
• Limited Connectivity, Endless Apps, Joaquim Rocha (video) — although already familiar to me, it was a nice overview of the product that I work on at Endless.
• State of the Builder, Christian Hergert — one of these days I will start using Builder as soon as I can find some time to get it to learn my preferred keybindings.
• The Battle over Our Technology, Karen Sandler (video) — the second of the two conference highlights, a timely reminder of why free software is important.
• Seamless Integration to Hack Desktop Applications, Simon Schampijer (video) — my coworker and fellow-person-whose-last-name-gets-pronounced-wrong Simon showed off one of the most empowering features that I have ever seen.
• Progressive Web Apps: an Opportunity for GNOME, Stephen Pearce (video) — I have been reading a lot about progressive web apps recently and am both excited and skeptical. (Stephen also made a webkit game in GJS in just one day.)
• Different Ways of Outreaching Newcomers, Julita Inca (video) — it was fantastic to see this legendary GNOME mentor and organizer speak in person.
• Lightning talks by the GSoC and Outreachy interns (video) — I always admire the intern sessions because I would have soiled myself had I had to speak to a 300-person conference room back when I was an intern. Hopefully next year the interns will have a session earlier in the day so their audience is fresher though! Also a shout out to my coworkers Kate Lasalle-Klein and Robin Tafel who are not interns but also gave a lightning talk during this session about working together with the GNOME design team. (If you’re looking for it in the other lightning talk video, you’re not finding it because it was in this session.)
• Fantastic Layouts and Where to Find Them, Martin Abente Lahaye (video) — a great introduction to Emeus, the constraint layout manager, with a surprise appearance from an airplane hack.
• Replacing C Library Code with Rust: What I Learned, Federico Mena Quintero (slides) — I am mentoring a Summer of Code student, Luke, who is doing some investigation into converting parts of GJS into Rust, and this talk really helped me understand some things from his work that I’ve been struggling with.
• Continuous: Past, Present, Future, Emmanuele Bassi (video) — this talk made me want to help out on that lonely, lonely build sheriff mountain.
• A Brief History of GNOME, Jonathan Blandford (video) — I had seen it before, but an hour well spent.
• GNOME to 2020 and Beyond, Neil McGovern (video) — by turns optimistic and pessimistic, the new GNOME executive director talked about the future.
• What’s Coverity Static Analysis Ever Done for Us?, Philip Withnall (video) — my coworker and fellow-person-with-an-excellent-first-name Philip talked about static analysis, which I cannot wait to start using on GJS.
• Building a Secure Desktop with GNOME Technologies, Matthew Garrett (video) — the excellent “raise your hand if your system is bugging you to install an update right now” line made this talk for me.
• GNOME Build Strategies and BuildStream, Tristan Van Berkom (video) — not quite what I expected, but luckily I got a better idea of what BuildStream does from the unconference session.
• Bringing GNOME Home to Ubuntu, Tim Lunn (video) — it was a pleasure to meet Tim in person, who did the SpiderMonkey porting work on GJS before me, and whose commits I have often referred to.
• GitLab, Carlos Soriano — I’m really excited to kick Bugzilla out of my workflow as soon as I can.
• Microsoft ❤️ Linux, Julian Atanasoae — If nothing else Julian is brave to get up in front of this audience and sing the praises of Microsoft. I am skeptically optimistic; sure, Microsoft is doing some great things for open source, I even had a slide about some Microsoft tools in my talk, but on the other hand let’s not forget they were still trying to undermine and destroy our community not too long ago.
• How to Get Better Mileage out of Glade, Juan Pablo Ugarte (video) — Slides created in Glade, what more could you ask for?
• Lightning talks (video) —The highlight for me of the second lightning talk session was Sri’s self-described “rant.” There were a few talks in the lineup that I felt it was too bad didn’t get any time.

There were also so many talks that were programmed opposite the talks that I decided to go see. It seemed like that happened more often than last year! (Either my interests have broadened, or the quality of the talks is increasing…) I will be watching many videos in the coming days, now that they have been released, but I was especially sad not to see the two talks on animations by Jakub Steiner and Tobias Bernard because they were opposite (and immediately after, respectively) my own talk!

And the video of my talk is now published as well, although like many people I find it excruciating to watch myself on video; the rest of you can watch it, I’ll watch this instead.

Unconference

The unconference part of the conference (where people propose topics, get together with like-minded attendees in a conference room, and talk or work together) was held in a nice workspace. I had one session on GJS on Monday where we first discussed how the Ubuntu desktop team (I got to meet Ken VanDine, Iain Lane, and Chris Coulson, as well as connect with Tim Lunn again) was going to deploy Mozilla’s security updates to Javascript (and therefore GJS and GNOME Shell) in Ubuntu’s long-term support releases. Then Stephen Pearce joined and suggested a GJS working group in order to make development more visible.

Later I joined the GNOME Shell performance session where I rebased Christian Hergert’s GJS profiler code and showed Jonas Adahl how it worked; we profiled opening and closing the overview.

On the second day I joined the Continuous and Builder sessions. Builder was looking good on a giant TV set!

On the third day I attended the BuildStream session and I’m quite excited about trying it out for a development workflow while hacking on a component of a Flatpak runtime, which is a shaky task at best using the current Flatpak tools.

In the afternoon I technically “had another GJS session” though it’s my experience on the third unconference day that all the sessions melt into one. This time many people went on a hike in the afternoon. I was very sad to have missed it, since I love hiking, but I was having an allergy attack at the time which made it difficult for me to be outside. However, I spent the afternoon working on the GObject class stuff for GJS instead, and chatting with people.

Social events

This GUADEC conference had the best social event on Saturday night: a GNOME 20th birthday party, complete with cake, old farts Q&A panel, trivia quiz, raffle, and a blast from the past dance floor with music from back when GNOME started. There was even an afterparty way into the small hours … which I did not go to because my talk was in the first slot on Sunday morning!

Apart from that there were many opportunities to connect with people, from day 1 through 6. One thing I like about GUADEC is that the days are not stuffed full of talks and there is plenty of time to have casual conversations with people. One “hallway session” that I had, for example, was a conversation with Marco Barisione, talking about the reverse debuggers RR and UndoDB. Another was with with Sri Ramkrishna, following on from his lightning “rant” on Sunday, about what kind of help beginning app writers are looking for, whether they can get it from tutorials or Stack Overflow, and what kinds of things get in their way.

Thanks

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance. I’m really glad to have been able to join in this year.