Wow it’s been ages since I last attended a conference in-person and since I last blogged.
I’m on my way back form Berlin Mini GUADEC 2022, and it was delightful! I’ve been able to meet pals, colleagues and comrades, old and new! The location was great, it’s a really cool hackerspace called c-base, decorated like a sci-fi spaceship with a gigantic 40×16px screen made out of old bottles of Club Mate.
The Talks
While I’ve not been able to watch all the talks I wanted to and while I didn’t always watch attentively, many talks caught my interest.
🌐 — I have particularly been interested by the talks about internet autonomy by Robert McQueen as this is something I’m realy looking forward to since a really long time. After all, why should I give Google — or any cloud provider — my calendar and the many many sensitive information it contains, when what I really want is to have the same calendar on my laptop and phone, all while keeping this private info for myself‽
⚡ — I also enjoyed the power measurement talk by Aditya Manglik. I’d really like to give Usage a new life as it’s a really neat little app, and having some power measurement info there totally makes sense.
✏️ — Allan Day’s talk about best practices for app design gave a great insight of what design languages are and how GNOME grew itself one.
🥵 — I didn’t learn much from Tobias Bernard’s talk about post-collapse computing, but it was nonetheless interesting and moving.
🤝 — I was particularly interested by the AGM this year too… am I… finally becoming an adult? 😳
I can’t wait to be back home to watch the talks I missed, especially the ones about community, accessibility and inclusivisty!
The Work
I didn’t do much regular work this week — conferences are quite demanding and you really want to focus on the rare occasions to socialize — yet I still did a few things, like:
- reporting that custom font sizes are ignored by Feeds,
- reporting some URLs aren’t parsed correctly by Feeds,
- reporting Feeds can destroy your feeds list,
- submitting porting Feeds to AdwAboutWindow,
- reporting that scrolling from maps triggers inertial scrolling in Fractal,
- submitting clamping the feature tile subtitle in Software,
- submitting making the empy state’s headerbar flat in Weather,
- and tons of less formal and less showable work.
Julian and I also looked a bit at making Metronome vendor its crates in a way that doesn’t require internet at build time, so we can finally update it on Flathub to the GNOME 42 runtime… without success sadly.
I also spent time trying recent versions of GNOME apps on the Librem 5 — especially the upcoming version of Nautilus — and compared the upcoming version of Phosh with the exciting mobile prototype of Shell on Jonas’ tablet and Pinephone Pro.
But more importantly, this conference has been a great opportunity to bond again with members of GNOME, including coworkers and friends! It’s easy to undermine how important in-person social interactions are for the health of the whole project.
The Format
The Berlin Mini GUADEC is a sattelite experiment of the main event in Guadalajara. I really enjoyed the mixed local and remote experience, and I think distributed conferences are something that should become the norm for GNOME.
I don’t have number, but this distributed experience felt like it was more inclusive as it allowed more persons to attend, and I assume it was cheaper too as the GNOME Foundation doesn’t have to subsidies as many transatlantic flights. But more importantly it allowed me to attend without contributing much to the destruction of life on Earth — including ours. I’m really considering to never ever attend any conference by plane anymore, and I would simply not have attended GUADEC this year because of the transatlantic flight, even though I would have loved to visit Guadalajara.
And The Rest
On a (somewhat) lighter note, I recently got into street stickers — you know, the kind that cover lamp posts in your city — and I have to say: Berlin didn’t disappoint me! Its streets are riddled with really cool looking ones.
BTW. Thibault. My name isn’t Adrieng Plazza.
