Back from GUADEC & Barcelona

On Monday evening I returned from Barcelona where I spent the weekend after the GNOME conference. I’ve just about caught up with the stuff that stacked up during the week away, and I hope to have a full night’s sleep some time soon.

I noticed that I was getting very little email while at GUADEC, and for a while I believed my theory that nobody was sending me email because everyone was already at GUADEC. But when I examined my Junk folder at home I realised that switching from SpamAssassin to Bogofilter on the first day had not been completely painless.

But along with my complete lack of responsibility this year (no board, no release-team, no guadec organisation), I think that helped me to enjoy the event. I actually went to talks and learned from them, and just hanging around meant that I met far more people than ever before at GUADEC. I’m not going to mention you all because the list would be huge, but I love you all and enjoyed meeting and talking with you. I like the GNOME people so much that I often really wish that I lived in a town like Boston, Barcelona, or Portland (and Helsinki now too), where there are large clusters of them that can see each other regularly.

Reading Planet GNOME while at GUADEC was a wonderfully positive experience, and it’s clear from the mass of photos that we are not your average hackers. GNOME is people. Without meaning to, we just did some great advertising of our core purpose. This is something that people want to be part of.

Lots of people gave me encouragement for my work on Glom, and showed me a few more bugs that I need to fix in version 1.0. I may have recruited a few people to help with some of the simpler tasks. My talk was a disaster because I couldn’t get my (cheap) laptop working with the projector, and had to wait for the disk check before I could even copy the slides to Christian Kirbach’s laptop. Daniel Holbach had Glom running on his laptop so I could show that to a small group of enthusiasts at the end. People seem to appreciate the concept and are reassured by the ability to extend Glom systems by using Python and PyGtk or by using Postgres directly. Now I just need the time/money to fix the bugs and add the features.

However, because I put all my ever-decreasing free time into maintaining gtkmm (fairly repetitive work that’s more responsibility than excitement because all the hard problems are long solved.) and Glom (exciting work that’s not yet widely known), I always have a guilty sense at GUADEC of not contributing enough.

Over the weekend I had a chance to play with my new (ridiculously expensive toy) wide-angle lens. I’ll need lots more practice.

Sigi, Fiona, Matthew Garrett, Robert McQueen

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