Damn French, they ruined France

... but they did not ruin another great GUADEC!

As I promised at the beginning, I would do another blog post at the end, and this is it.
The first days were hectic as usual, with lots of great presentations, lighting talks and team reports for what others have been doing for the last past years. Many people already blogged on this topic, and video recordings will be out soon, so I would not go further on this.
As a special exception, though, go check out Christian Hergert's talk on GNOME Builder: he is awesome for quitting his job and deciding to investing so much of his own time and money into making our lives easier with better development tools.

Following the core days, came the BOFs. I attended the Release Team meeting, where a lot of process clean ups were approved, hopefully making the requirements for being "part of GNOME" (at the various levels) clearer and more transparent.
I also went to the GTK+ meeting, but lack of sleep from the previous days together with awesome Belgian beer that turns out to be French beer (also from the days before) turned me into a zombie background figure. Stay tuned for GTK+ 3.16 though, that's where all the fun (actors^H layers, a better list model, full wayland support, and more) will be!
Finally it's probably a good thing I did not attend the Privacy BOF, because it would have been quite embarrassing considering how poor is the privacy story with GNOME Weather is: through the search provider, we would send the stored locations to the upstream services (often in clear text, and often including the current location) every time a search was performed in the overview. This is obviously unacceptable, unless the user opts in, so the search provider will be disabled by default (when #734048 lands).

Speaking of GNOME Weather, if you follow the Summer of Code projects you may know that there is an intern working on a complete redesign on the app. He personally wasn't at GUADEC unfortunately, but I had some time to sit down with the ever awesome Allan Day to work out all the details.
The code is not in master (it will be when I run the final tests and reviews, but it's almost ready, and will surely be in 3.13.90), but I can show you a preview:

(you can see we've come a long way since the original announcement!)

This is all for now. I'd like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me, and see you next year!

PS: the title is just a reference of a famous quote by Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons, and it's not meant to be in any way unfriendly to our transalpine neighbors

There's no Guadec like this Guadec

...And that is true every year!

This is a very short post, because Guadec has barely started (the first of the core days was yesterday), but already we had the chance to go out and party togheter - which is Guadec is about, right?

More seriously, I'm really happy I had the chance to see all GNOME friends again, after last year in Brno, and I'd like to thank once again the Foundation for sponsoring me, even though I haven't been very active in the recent past.

On the technical side, I'm taking advance of this first break to start reviewing Saurabh's patches that are implementing the wonderful new design for GNOME Weather. Looking at the Shell, I had a nice conversation with Jasper, and the outcome was that in the short term, there won't be user visible changes (except of course for Carlos's work in the app view) - no new features but stability and bug fixes.

Again, this is a short post because we just started, I will do another blog post at the end. Stay tuned!

San Francisco Hackfest!

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since I last blogged, and I should probably even stop pretending I will blog more, but anyway...
Today is the third day of the GNOME Hackfest here at the Endless Mobile offices, in the startup neighborhood of San Francisco, in the hearth of the Silicon Valley - where stuff happens in technology, and free software is no exception.

So, what I have been doing?
On Wednesday we started with defining the agenda for the three days, and my friends already blogged about that.
I had the chance to meet with Kristian and the unstoppable Jasper to discuss wayland's xdg_surface, state changes and resizing - and that will mean we will bring an end to all flickering you see everyday in x11 when you maximize or resize a window. Not to mention we sorted out transients (popovers and tooltips) in a world where the application does not know its absolute position.
We also all toghether discussed application sandboxes, as Lennart and Kay were here and they were kind to explain how kdbus helps in making future applications secure.

Thursday morning on the other hand was gjs. Jasper, Cosimo, Colin and I sat down and landed a lot of GC improvements that will bring more responsiveness and less memory usage to your JS applications (as well as your favorite desktop shell). We introduced background sweeping for certain large objects such as byte arrays and cairo surfaces, we fixed cairo_region and GParamSpec bindings and we made sure the GC runs often.
In the afternoon we had a presentation by our host, Endless Mobile. We were shown what they're doing, and saw a prototype of their product (a BayTrail based desktop PC with a very stylish sort of oval case). I believe what they're trying to achieve is amazing, because really the emerging markets have billions of potential customers in a place where Windows doesn't matter, and will be great for GNOME and Free Software in general if they succeed.
After that Jim Nelson from Yorba and Daniel Foré from Elementary joined us for a long session on helping application developers, ISVs and other communities to use our platform. We talked IDEs, tooling, documentation, in preparation for the Developer Experience hackfest in Berlin. I won't be in Berlin (unfortunately it's exam week at my university), but it's been interesting to listen anway.

Besides work, I took some time on Tuesday to visit the city of San Francisco, walking all along the bay coast, and even had a chance to visit the university of Stanford, down in Palo Alto.
And for all of that I'm having a wonderful time, and I'd like to thank the GNOME Foundation and all the contributors for sponsoring me to come here.