cfoch && GUADEC 2014

One night of 25 July, in the Jorge Chávez (Lima, Perú) airport, there was a suitcase with the image of a foot stuck in the middle of everything you could imagine there. This suitcase would be sent later to the Entzheim airport (Strasbourg, France). It arrived to Strasbourg by night and it was taken to a house in the middle of the night where it would stay about one week. There was something strange in this house. It was hosting many objects with the figure of the foot graven. In point of fact, it was not casual and something big would happen.

When I got FEC, there was a frenchman who indicated me the way to get my room. When I enter, I realized that someone else had been already there. I was unpacking my suitcase and ordering my stuff when someone opened the door: it was my roommate. Anuj Khale, a guy from India, would be my roommate for the next days. He was a GSoC student like me. After some talk in the room, we went out to go for a walk Strasbourg streets and after that each one went to sleep. The next day would be the Evince Hackfest and he was participating there.

I had been participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program in Pitivi, a video editor. During the initial period of the GSoC, I had been in contact with Pitivi guys via IRC and Hangouts, but I didn’t meet them face to face. The second day, before the Evince Hackfest, at breakfast, I met many people of GNOME: one of them was Kat, who is part of the Travel Committee and Jeff, UI designer of Pitivi and now part of the Board of Directors as Kat, who had been helping me with many good ideas about the development of my project. But I didn’t meet nobody: Julita was there, too. She is a peruvian girl, part of the documentation team, ex OPW, and organizer of many events of GNOME in Perú.

The first talk I attended to was “What’s new in Gstreamer” by Tim Muller and Sebastian Droge. I met there more people who I was talking with via IRC for months. I could meet the guys of Pitivi: Mathieu, Thibault and Lubosz, another GSoC student like me. It was really amazing to meet them in person. We talked about Pitivi, football, food while we went to have some lunch in some french restaurant. After that we went to the venue to do something in Pitivi and Gstreamer. Thibault’s brother has a flat in Strasbourg and when the conference finished we went there to continue hacking! That was so almost everyday. I realized there how difficult can be to find a place to eat when a canadian, a german, a peruvian and two french guys are all together in car: you can spent almost 45 minutes going in circles around the city to get off the car to finally decide to go eating to another place to go in circles again! Maybe it was not 1 hour, but it was so much time going in circles and that it was a really funny.

GUADEC 2014 has been really helpful for me to understand a lot of details I couldn’t understand. This conference has made me get more interested about Gstreamer because Pitivi depends so much of it. Now Google Summer Of Code is about to end and I have more ideas that I would like to implement or improve like “film titles”. I am going to continue contributing in Pitivi and Gstreamer. GNOME people, you’re really amazing. I hope to see you next year. Now the suitcase with the image of the foot stuck lies down in my some part of my house in Lima hoping to return back to enjoy a new adventure.

http://youtu.be/r07bgp6jDIM

[Poor quality video]