13 August, 2013

Back from GUADEC 2013




It has been a very intense week at GUADEC and not just because of the heat of course! I managed to attend several interesting talks, got to know lots of new people and managed to answer some questions that have been in my head for months now.

Regarding to the talks, I speacially enjoyed Juan Pablo Ugarte's one, "Rich custom user interfaces with Glade and CSS" where he showed us, how to creat an awesome presentation using Glade & CSS. What a work! I also enjoyed Lennart Poettering's talk about "Sandboxing applications for GNOME". I could even understand what he was talking about this time! "GNOME and ownCloud" by Jan-Christoph Borchardt was another favourite one.

Appart from these talks, I also got inspired by Fabiana Simões with her fullstory on how to report a UX bug properly and by Ekaterina Gerasimova and Shindu Sundar with their "done is better than perfect" statement.

I also attended the "Women in Tech" and "Web Development" hackfests, both super interesting. I missed more men in the "Women in Tech" hackfest though, but the good thing, is that we talked about how to solve this "issue". We also did some brainstorming and had some good ideas on how to make it easier for newcomers, and other communities to get involved.

The good, and maybe the best thing for me at GUADEC, is what you learn out of the talks. This time I went to GUADEC with the intention of finding myself a new project to work on, to find my place in the GNOME project. In this search, I had the chance to talk to a bunch of people who were very interested on helping me out, even if they did not really know that they were doing it. For this reason, I want to thank Joanmarie Diggs, for paying me attention without even knowing me and trying to really help me to find the place. Also to Fabiana Simões and Andreas Nilsson, who showed themselfes very welcoming when I joined the Web Developer hackfest, and in the last place but not less important, to Marina Zhurakhinskaya for a great long "therapeutic" walk from Česka to the dormitory. Thank you all for making me feel very welcome!

Also, congratulations to all of the volunteers and organizers, who made this event possible, and once again, thank you very much to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip. Looking forward to Strasbourg 2014!