GUADEC 2017

One of the things I like the most about GNOME are the annual conferences called GUADEC. You can see in person to the folks you were chatting with on IRC. As I have mentioned in my previous posts, I am an accepted GSoC 2017 student this year, and thus like other students, I was invited to give a lightning talk about my project with Pitivi, that consist on adding a plugin system as I mentioned in other posts. I live in Peru, so the duration of the flight is really long. Actually, I found a great deal by going first to Madrid and then taking other flight to Manchester. From Lima to Amsterdam (the stop of my flight to Madrid) it was about 12 hours, from Amsterdam to Madrid it was about 3 hours and from Madrid to Manchester about 2 hours. Yup! Almost 17 hours flying. But it was worth it.

I arrived to Manchester on July 27 at 12:20 p.m. and the weather surprised me with a strong rain. It may be more surprising when you live in a city were it does not rain. Then I had to go to the Manchester Metropolitan University where many of the GNOME contributors would be hosted. When the bus stopped on the Manchester Metropolitan University I went to the first building of it I see and asked how to get to the Birley Fields, our accomodations. A man told me the directions and gave me a map. After some minutes walking I got the office that assigns the rooms to the new residents. I met there Mario, a guy from GNOME who is involved in Flatpak. It was interesting to talk with him in English when at the end we realized that we both could speak in Spanish. After leaving my stuff on my room, I left the room to walk outside and I found David King. It was incredible because it was almost three years we didn’t see to each other. In that day, I also met hadess (Bastien Nocera). He helped me to get a traveler adapter. This was also the day of pre-registration in a bar called KROBAR. I got joined to the GStreamer folks who I met before in GUADEC 2014. Some of the guys came up with the idea that the GNOME logo needs a new design. I talked about it before on the #gnome-design channel. I also met ystreet00 (Matthew Waters) who helped once to create a GStreamer plugin with OpenGL.

The next day the talks started. In the venue, one of the first things I did was to buy a GNOME t-shirt. One of the talks I was very interested in was the one of Alexander Larsson about Flatpak and the one of Christian Hergert about GNOME Builder. I was very interested in the conference of hergertme because I has taken some of the ideas of GNOME Builder to apply them in Pitivi. I don’t always use this application because I am not totally adapted to it, but now I am considering to use it more instead of just coding on Gedit. That day I met Lucie Charvát, a student of the Google Summer of Code who is working in a nice feature of GNOME Builder that I always was thinking that was missing. Finally, I met to suhas2go (Suhas), other of the GSoC guys working on Pitivi like me. It was really awesome to meet him :) That day I also found Julita, who put strong effort to spread the word of GNOME in Peru. She introduced me to Rafał Lużyński who is from Krakow. It was a great coincidence because I was going to visit visit Warsaw and Krakow after GUADEC.

The second day of talks I woke up very early, about 4:00 a.m. and it was so the rest of the days. I took this as an advantage to continue with my GSoC project. One of the conferences I was most interested in was the one about Wayland, which is a project I have some interest on getting involved because it seems challenging to me and because of the EVoC. Other talk I found pretty interesting and I think I will investigate more about it was the one titled “Fantastic Layouts And Where To Find Them”. I promise to post about it as soon I try it, because you can create different layouts in GTK+ with a very simple syntax, that seems really easy to remember and understand. That day we had the party for the 20th anniversary of GNOME. I met there Federico Mena, who was telling me about how they started GNOME. It was awesome to listen to him, it was like traveling to the past and I am very grateful with the work of this man. After the event finish, I met Christian Hergert in person. I was talking with him about libpeas and GSettings. After talking with him I was convinced that Pitivi should use GSettings instead of ConfigParser.

The last day of the conference three Pitivi contributors (Jeff, Suhas and I) were together. I showed to Jeff a project I was working on during my vacations of the university that was a plugin for GStreamer I called gstblendersrc which I hope to continue and finish after GSoC finishes. During talks there was an open talk I was interested in that was Microsoft loves Linux. I has never supported Microsoft, but they are good in business, my interest was basically because before arriving to Manchester, during my flight from Madrid to Manchester I was reading a book named Conscious Capitalism by John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods Market) who states that capitalism gives efficiency to non-profit organizations. By the way, I recommend the GNOME Board to read this book. Then the groupal photo took place and the lighning talks. I hope to be in Almeria the next year that is where next GUADEC will take place. Then it was the city tour, but, unfortunately, I lost the group. Anyway, it was a great opportunity to hack on Pitivi.

The next days were the workshops. Suhas and I were working on Pitivi. Suhas learns very fast, I think. When I did my first GSoC I had some problems. We sometimes helped between us, but that was not happening with frequency. The last day of the workshops I was looking for David King because I was thinking about working in Cheese for my thesis, but I couldn’t find him. I was with Julita and Felipe Borges. I told him about a project I have on my mind to implement in Cheese that is adding stickers over the detected faces on people. He started to give me more ideas, like to have a library of stickers fed by the community. Also he told me that it could be possible to add watermarks in Cheese so in presentations events of GNOME, people can take pictures with Cheese with the stickers and the final picture would have a watermark of even the Cheese logo or the GNOME logo. Now I need to talk about it to some professors. That was my next-to-last day in Manchester. Felipe Borges showed me some pictures of the tour he had in the Manchester United Stadium. So I went there the last day of the workshops.