My first GUADEC :D

I attended my first GUADEC this year which was held at Manchester, UK. One of the reason I started contributing to GNOME was becasue of the family like community it has. Being a newcomer at GNOME, I felt so welcomed and part of this huge family at GUADEC!

Day 1 - My lighting talk!

The conference kicked off with amazing talks on the first day. I’d like to mention the ones which were the highlights for me :) Allan Day’s “The GNOME Way” talked about the principles we should follow at GNOME. One principle that appealed to me the most was “We take responsibility for User Experience”, it made me realize the magnitude of impact my GSoC project - Custom Effect UI for Pitivi has. Christian Hergert showed us some cool animations of Builder!

One of my favorite talks of GUADEC was Arun Raghavan’s because of its simplicty. He talked about making better the home media experience on GNOME, how we already have all the pieces required for GNOME Screencast (GNOMECast!) and that all that needs to be done now is for someone to bring the pieces together. I wonder how much skill this ‘simple’ task would require :P

I was thrilled (and nervous) to see so many people attend the intern lightning talks. I got to present my GSoC work for Pitivi. The recording of the talks will soon be made available.

Day 2 - GNOME 20th Anniversary Party!

The highlight of the second day was Jonathan’s “The History of GNOME” - “All we are doing is removing features from when we started” :D. We spent the evening celebrating the 20th Anniversary of GNOME. The insider talks with a few GNOME Oldtimers was the best part of the party. Aaaaaand, I won 1 year VPN subscription in the raffle (where is my prize though, I haven’t got it yet :D)

Day 3 - Exploring Manchester!

There was a discussion/announcement about the decision to move to GitLab. Personally, I am very excited and totally in agreement. I think it would vastly increase the developer experience and make it easier for more people to contribute.

Juan Pablo’s talk about Glade showcased it’s modern UI and how one can easily insert custom widgets in glade by writing a simple catalog file (xml).

Later, we went on a city tour exploring Manchester..

Meeting people

Ofcourse I met a lot of people at GUADEC! However, I’d like to mention a few -

• Jean-François Fortin Tam (Jeff/nekohayo) - My GSoC project builds upon Jeff’s work. He appreciated my work and was so glad to see the color wheel widget :)

• Georges Stavracas (feaneron) - When I started open source, I used to go through feaneron’s blog a lot. His journey has been inspirational. I am so happy that I got to meet him!

The Trek!

Thanks to the weather gods showing mercy on us, we went on a trek to the Peak District. Allan Day was such a wonderful guide, it was my first time trekking and it was amazing ^_^

Final Words…

I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my visit to GUADEC, the organising team for doing a wonderful job and the volunteers for helping out :) Thank you all who were at this GUADEC in making it the most awesome one yet :D See you all next year at Almería.