Monday, July 16, 2018

GUADEC 2018 Almería

I recently attended the recent GNOME Users and Developers European Conference (GUADEC) in Almería, Spain. This was my fifth GUADEC and as always I was able to attend thanks to my employer Canonical paying for me to be there. This year we had seven members of the Ubuntu desktop team present. Almería was a beautiful location for the conference and a good trade for the winter weather I left on the opposite side of the world in New Zealand.


This was the second GUADEC since the Ubuntu desktop switched back to shipping GNOME and it’s been great to be back. I was really impressed how positive and co-operative everyone was; the community seems to be in a really healthy shape. The icing on the cake is the anonymous million dollar donation the foundation has received which they announced will be used to hire some staff.


The first talk of the week was from my teammates Ken VanDine, Didier Roche and Marco Treviño who talked about how we’d done the transition from Unity to GNOME in Ubuntu desktop. I was successful in getting an open talk slot and did a short talk about the state of Snap integration into GNOME. I talked about the work I’d done making snapd-glib and the Snap plugin in GNOME Software. I also touched on some of the work James Henstridge has been working on making Snaps work with portals. It was quite fun to see James be a bit of a celebrity after a long period of not being at a GUADEC - he is the JH in JHBuild!


After the first three days of talks the remaining three days are set for Birds of a Feather sessions where we get together in groups around a particular topic and discuss and hack on that. I organised a session on settings which turned out to be surprisingly popular! It was great to see everyone that I work with online in-person and allowed us to better understand each other. In particular I caught up with Georges Stavracas who has been very patient in reviewing the many patches I have been working on in GNOME Control Center.


I hope to see everyone again next year!