Long time no blog. My work load during the last three weeks, since we came back from Vilanova, has prevented me from writing anything about what happened there. So 20 days late, here is my summary.
About te BoFs I coordinated:
- BoF on continuous integration for Gnome. It was a clear success. More than 30 people attending (and interested). We managed to get the participation of Thomas Vander Stichele, who has experience using BuildBot for Gstreamer, Frederic Peters, developer of jhAutoBuild, and our José Dapena, who has adapted jhbuild and tinderbox to Gnome. Luis Villa, who had been the continuous integration man for Gnome during the last years, was also there. Thus, as we had the right ingredients, the BuildBrigade (a working group -with already more than 10 members- inside Gnome, in charge of the creation and promotion of an automatic build environment for the project) was created. The general requirements and ideas were agreed during the BoF, and the same afternoon we got together again for deciding about the technical details and the first steps to carry out. I have to say I am very happy with the results of the BoF. Stay tuned! [The slides I used are available here]
- BoF on the development of business applications with/in Gnome. Quite successful. About 20 people attending. We spent 1 hour talking about how the development of business (ERP-like) applications (using Gnome technologies) relate to the development of the Gnome platform. Lorenzo Gil, creator of Gazpacho, Fernando San Martín, developer of PyGestor and a bunch of Fisterra developers were there. Unfortunately other people interested like Johan Dahlin from the projects Kiwi and Stoq, or Murray Cumming from Glom could not make it for the BoF. There are different approaches for the development of that kind of applications, but in general the feeling was that we have things that could -and should- be shared (knowledge, patterns, marketing, widgets, libraries, and so on); also, the feeling was that they could and should be shared probably inside Gnome. The goal now is to create permanent channels for continuing the discussion and finding out what and how we should share results among projects. [The slides I used are available here]
In general I liked the conference very much. My five favorite talks were:
- “Creating Passionate Users” by Kathy Sierra (inspiring, I have added her interesting weblog to my Liferea feeds).
- “How much faster“, by Federico Mena (interesting, giving focus to the whole Gnome project with clear and simple messages).
- “Gnome is people“, by Luis Villa (touching).
- “Women in Free Software“, by Anne Østergaard (Codename: 0:181 Nunca Máis).
- OLPC by Jim Gettys (the social side).
And I should not forgot to mention that we (the marine blue team) won The Other WorldCup with a very effective mix of catenaccio and total football 😉
Therefore, a lot of new experiences, people, projects and opportunities. I am looking forward to Guadec 2006 in Birmingham (and also to the Guadec Hispana, which will take place a few days before in Granada).