I finally started to put the whole organisational part in motion before going to GUADEC, and now I'm finally starting to publicise the course! I'm going to teach again my Python course, for adults this time, for people with no programming background. The course will start on August 23rd and last 5 weeks. More information about it on Tog's website!

Any question or query, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I wonder how teaching adults will differ from teaching teenagers... That should be very interesting (and scary, of course! :))

This is the talk that was hijacked by the release team to make the announcement about the delay in releasing Gnome 3.

Gnome 3: Where we are

Vincent Untz began by reminding us that there is a lot of excitement around Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell. To encourage the initial development effort around Gnome 3, the release team boldly stated 2 years ago that Gnome 2.30 would be Gnome 3. The community then reached a level of activity never seen in years. It was a very aggressive schedule, and it was meant that way: perhaps the work would not have started or not have been so intense without it.

However, Gnome sticks to a predictable 6 months schedule, and quality matters more than anything else. We want people to love Gnome 3. After waiting 8 years since Gnome 2.0, we want this release to be amazing. That is why the release team decided to move Gnome 3.0 release date to March 2011, having closely following mailing lists and using GUADEC as an opportunity to get the latest from every team.

• Many modules, such as Gnome-shell are nearly there and could be okay for a release in September. But we want this release to be amazing, not simply okay.

• Platform-wise, most people have stopped using the deprecated stuff, which is good.

• Some modules will need more time to migrate, such as gsettings and the Human Interface Guidelines update which would not be ready in 2 months (Note: I attended a lightning talk about this and I like what they're planning on doing with this: a series of design patterns rather than a gigantic monolithic document that is hard to parse. They only started this the week before GUADEC though!)

The work for September

Some may worry that this is a bit late for such an announcement, and too much work to prepare Gnome 2.32 in September. Some modules will need to switch back to Gtk2.

There will also be a Gnome 3.0 beta release in September (\o/). The release team wants everyone to start using it, play with it, and report bugs. Application developers should start porting their application to Gtk3, as it will take time to get there and it would be better to start this work in September rather than next March.

The talk ended with a list of TODOs for the release team.

• Revert to gtk2. They believe it was not that hard to move to 3, therefore it should not be hard to move back to 2. They're happy to help if people are not sure how to do this. Ideally this should be done though a new flag, to give an option to compile with gtk2 or gtk3 so that people focusing on the gtk3 effort may keep working on it.

• They will keep pushing for Gnome 3, Gnome 2.32 is only a step. Keep porting!

• Some modules such as Shell will be in feature freeze, to polish and finish what they've started.

• The release team will also push the community to implement designs. Good mockups are being made and we're happy about it, but then nothing is done about them.

The questions part of the talk was interesting albeit a bit tense.

Gnome 2.32

The first question was about the 6 months release schedule, and whether it really was a valid reason to have a 2.32. What would be the content, wouldn't it only take time away from people's work on Gnome 3? Maintainers cannot be forced to do anything, and if they have better reasons to work on 3 it's okay. Perhaps other maintainers will have built new features and will want them to be used by people without having to wait 9 months. The audience still worried about the maintenance burden and cost for people already depending on Gtk3 features, but the speaker seemed confident that switching back to 2 was mostly about changing some configure options, and that no one had to do if it was too much overhead.

Still maintainers in the audience insisted that having both 2.32 and a Beta meant twice the work. Why spend time on something that matters less and less? They also disagreed that having gnome-shell and 2.32 in the background was a good idea, as it's not how the design is done nor how it's meant to work. Gnome 3 should be more than the Shell. Untz seems to believe that many features do not rely on Gtk3 or the Shell.

Maintainers contended that it wasn't the same amount of work for an application like Cheese compared to the core desktop. There is a burden to support 2 desktop environments in parallel. To which Untz answered that feature freeze was still planned for the following week, leading to a "what's the point?" question. Once again, if people don't want to do it, they don't have to.

Marketing

Concerns about the marketing message were quickly relieved by someone from the marketing team, who said that the "Beta" label generates excitement. Anyone with a feature that is stable enough should stick it in, although the control centre is another matter. We still want to ship a quality product, if it only has half the features it's okay as long as they're stable. It will generate the buzz.

There was a question about working with distros to help ship 3.0 in a way that is easier to install, to encourage people to try out the beta. There are instructions for many distros already, but it was suggested to also offer clear and prominent instructions on the Gnome front page once the beta's out.

The last question was about what the schedule would look like for the next 6 months. Although the schedule will be mostly normal, with new modules and new features, some rules will be similar to now in that new applications won't be accepted in just because they're great. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to have a freeze for everything, but for some modules it does.

Final words

Keep working on Gnome 3.0!

It's strange that I had to fly to the Netherlands and speak with some cool folks from Germany to learn about this, but the first MeeGo Conference is planned to occur in Dublin this November. Their call for papers includes talks targeting newcomers to the platform, and the event looks like it's going to be free... I wonder if I should take this as an invitation to give in and finally get myself a shiny, shiny N900.

EDIT (Aug 8th): Now with a shiny website!

I missed the talk at GUADEC, but some very cool stats on Gnome participation were released. The full report is available and there is also a blog post summarising some of the information. Looks like my experience of mostly meeting people employed to work on or with Gnome is either a coincidence or more specific to GUADEC than to Gnome itself.

Lots, lots, lots of bicycles. After 5 days I still haven't totally grokked the explicit and implicit rules of where to walk to avoid being run over by a bike. But I survived!

At GUADEC, when someone asks you "what do you do?" they mean in Gnome. I met very few people that weren't paid to work on Gnome in some way or shape. I introduced myself as "a happy user" (I am!) which seemed to delight some people. I got a couple of "good bye, happy user!" as I was leaving the hotel lobby at an(other) unofficial after-party yesterday, that was quite funny. Probably from people who couldn't remember my name as I wasn't wearing my badge anymore ;)

I've learnt many things and met a ton of very cool people over the last few days, although tonight my mind is kinda blank. Information and people overload, between the conference all day long followed by parties every night, GUADEC gets kinda intense. I'm delighted and plotting whether I'll be able to go next year. Someone offered to mentor/help me out with getting involved with some Gnome-love bugs. There'll be a HackFest in Berlin in December. I'm looking forward to following up with many of the people I've befriended over the last few days, after I sleep some!

Lots of people don't seem to know Moo cards and loved my MiniCards, sometimes asking me if they could please get one while I was handing it to someone else. If you got here from the link on my card now you know where to get MiniCards of your own :)

My worries about Gnome 3 have been lessened some. I don't know if it's attending so many talks by passionate hard-working people, or something they put in the water at GUADEC that makes me come back feeling very positive and confident about Gnome 3. March 2011!

I will be flying to Amsterdam tomorrow. Bag's ready, only need to select 1 or 2 books that are both interesting and light. If everything goes according to plan flight-wise I'll be able to attend the Gnome Women dinner tomorrow night, which should be good fun and a great way to start meeting Gnome people!

I'm looking forward to talks targeting new Gnome contributors, like "5 things every Gnome hacker should know". I'd also like to learn more on Telepathy -- "Gnome 3: the Telepathic Desktop" looks like it should be interesting -- and I want to attend a few other talks about Gnome 3 to reassure myself about the future of Gnome and what the roadmap looks like post 3.0 release. I can never quite make up my mind between coolness and worries, whenever I think about it.

Looking forward to it all!

Curious about git (http://git-scm.com)? Drop by Tog on Sunday at 11am. I've been demoing the basics informally, we'll probably be looking at collaboration this Sunday. Very informal chat, though feel free to let me know if you intend on stopping by.

What an awesome, awesome conference this has been.

Saturday

Many interesting talks and presentations on Saturday, mostly on different aspects of web development (saw 2 on measuring and improving UI performance), one on Clojure (I'm glad I know more about it though I still don't feel interested enough to want to give it a go yet) (Scheme is higher on the list!), a dynamic introduction to writing your own XMPP bot. There's a few talks like the Python puzzlers I want to catch on video when they're available. I saw lots of people with N900 around and oh, how I lust.

The venue could have used some air conditioning but besides that it was great, especially in the afternoon once there was more talks going on at the same time, so the rooms were less likely to be filled up. The corridors were not blocked but because the space was still, let's say cosy you would often end up besides someone and just strike random nerdy conversations. I really enjoyed that and met some very interesting people.

The evening was very well organised as well. Tasty dinner in the Radisson then live music, way too loud like Irish people tend to like (?), but after moving away a tiny bit further with a couple of attendees I met at the bar  we were able to talk about Tog and other topics. Lots of people asked me about the hackerspace over the week-end actually (I was proudly wearing my Tog tee-shirt on Saturday!), it's great to see people so curious and inspired by the idea.

And oh, the swag. Yay! Tee-shirts my size!

Sunday

I'd never been to a Python sprint before so I wasn't sure at all how it organises / self-organises. I felt very inspired by the XMPP talk from the day before (such simplicity, and yet, such power!) and I wanted to give a go at the sample bot the speaker, Victor Hugo, had published on GitHub before the talk. So I ended up with my name on a whiteboard besides XMPP, heh heh. At the beginning of the day one of the organisers asked us what we wanted to "lead a session on" and put the names, topics and rooms on a whiteboard. People were free to add up other topics as the day went along, or drop by on a session they were interested in.

Overall this felt like one of Tog's synchronous hackathon except more organised. I was delighted when someone showed up a bit later who was curious about XMPP too and sat besides me so we could work at figuring it out together. Having the speaker sitting nearby was handy too to answer questions on some aspects of XMPP communication through Python. After having the basic code running I decided to try to scrap my favourite dictionary website, wordreference.com to get basic English to French / French to English word translation. It took me longer to remember how to work with BeautifulSoup than adding the XMPP command but still, it works and was good fun. (The code is here!)

After the tasty lunch at Boticelli, I went to the "Python: building community" session, which touched on topics  like enabling newcomers to join the community and feel welcome, how the existence of a Python certification would help increase Python visibility and credibility with employers, and then one of my favourite topics, outreach to students and younger people. I got a lot of energy out of that last part and I'm motivated to set up my "introduction to programming using Python" workshop/course that has been postponed since June. More on that on this blog soon. We talked about organising quarterly events such as sprints, particularly aiming to involve university students which should be great fun too.

I'm delighted with my (quite exhausting!) week-end, and very thankful to the conference organisers for enabling us to have such an awesome time. Very energising, or as I should be saying: it was great craic.

PyCon Ireland begins tomorrow! There might be a few tickets left to be bought at the door, if you haven't gone one yet. I am looking forward to it immensely, and should probably head to bed soon if I want to make it in time for the early start :)

• An interesting project is brewing up in Camara to provide IT Support for Irish schools. I'm keenly looking forward to the first meetup to hear more about it.

• Another cool LWN article on Bringing open-source to schools that I'm only properly catching up on now. The projects linked to are worth following, like Máirín Duffy's 'Introduction to Inkscape' lessons plans and resources for K12 educators. LWN recaps on her experience teaching that specific course. Very energising and inspiring!

Currently learning and messing around with pyGTK. Pretty cool stuff! :)