Last week I traveled to Zürich to attend to BlinkOn 2 at the office Google has there. This is the first time the event is done in Europe (previous one at US) and it was a very good opportunity to meet all the people working around Blink, Chromium and Skia.
Zürich
As Igalia has a long experience working on browsers technologies, it was represented by four igalians who are working on different areas: Manuel Rego on CSS, Xabier Rodríguez on multimedia and Eduardo Lima together with me on graphics and Skia.
The attendees of this conference were not only googlers, there were people from Opera, Samsung, Intel and much more companies interested on meeting each other and collaborate to improve Blink.
Google Zürich office
Conference
The talks were covering a lot of different areas of a browser: from memory leaks or image filters to security models to name a few of them. Worth to mention Manuel Rego's talk which was about his latest work on CSS Grid Layout (more details in his blog).
BlinkOn 2
I have attended to the talks more related to graphics on the browser as this is one of the areas I am currently working on: "Rendering for Glass Time", "Responsive images", "Chasing Pixels", "Filter effects", "Storage modes for 2D canvas" and "60fps on mobile".
I would like to highlight the talk given by Justin Novosad (Google) where he explained his proposal of different storage modes for 2D canvas: persistent memory, discardable memory and none. Each one with different use cases and consequences on memory usage with focus on mobile devices dealing with very large canvases and there was a discussion about how to provide a useful API for web developers.
I attended to more that the aforementioned talks: the always interesting "Memory leaks in Blink" report, "Web animations", "Out-of-process iframes", "Smooth to the touch: challenges in input on mobile", the Opening talk and "Trace reading clinic" which was very useful to learn more about the tracing tools available in Chromium.
This conference was also the excuse to meet some Skia developers in person and talk about Igalia's contributions and future work on this 2D graphics library.
I would like to thank Google for its great job organizing BlinkOn at its office in Zürich and also Igalia for sponsoring my trip.
Miscellanea
But as not everything would be work, I also met an old friend who is working at Google to give me an update of his last years while drinking good coffee.
At the last day, just before returning home, I bought a very appreciated gift for my relatives... good Swiss chocolate! Yummy!