This is a good excuse as any other to retake the blog back to life.
It has been a long, long time since I was writing here last time, and I have been doing quite different things since then. As part of the Igalia browsers team, I have been working on WebKit related projects (mostly WebKitGTK+ and Epiphany), contributing on Chromium and Blink, and dealing with the coverage of Media Source Extensions specification.
Now going back to the reason for this post, it was my first year both at FOSDEM and Brussels. I had an idea about the size of the event, but it was indeed quite impressive.
This year we had four talks from igalians there, sharing the state on a few things that some our teams have been working on. In this case, we were talking about OpenGL conformance validation, on our improvements on performance and testing with Pflua, and the progress on LibreOffice for Android.
In particular the Igalia talks at FOSDEM 2015 were the following ones:
- High-performance packet filtering with Pflua by Andy Wingo
- Property-based testing an open-source compiler, pflua by Katerina Barone-Adesi
- How to test OpenGL drivers using Free Software by Samuel Iglesias
- A vision about a LibreOffice document manager for Android by Jacobo Aragunde
The four of them were really cool, and they had a lot of people attending to (well done mates 😀 )
Also, after digesting the FOSDEM huge schedule, my plan was to get the most out of the profiling and multimedia related tracks, and a few other talks that were calling my attention.
Saturday
On top of my colleagues presentations, and a part of the introductory talk by Karen Sandler, I could attend to Valgrind Integration in the Eclipse IDE , What is wrong with Operating Systems, Tuning Valgrind for your Workload, GStreamer in the living room and in outer space, How to start hacking on Valgrind by example and How to record all TV. Creating a 30 channel DVR.
There were some useful tricks at the Valgrind track and a nice overview on GStreamer portability. It was also curious finding RMS at the exhibition area. After a long conference day, it was Delirium Tremens time.
Sunday
My schedule for the Sunday was Ubuntu on phones and beyond, Mobile == Web, Kodi mediacenter (XBMC) past, present and future, It’s not a bug, it’s an environment problem, Servo (the parallel web browser) and YOU! and Living on Mars: A Beginner’s Guide.
I found particularly interesting the one from Stormy Peters on how limited the understanding of the web is going to be for the next new billion users due to the devices used for it. I had also planned to attend to the one by Habib Virji (who I knew at the 2014 Web Engines Hackfest) but is talk on Web Security was full.
It was also curious the closing keynote on Mars One project. It would be fun if they manage to solve the (apparently still quite complex) open problems and this generation can witness a Mars colony.
To conclude, I think I probably rushed too much to get myself into an excessive amount of talks for 2 days, but it was great in any case to get info and fresh updates on the state of a lot of projects, meet some old friends, and breath some (literally) fresh air.