This sounds so, so cool: Mozilla Drumbeat Festival. "Join us in Barcelona for three days of making, teaching, hacking, inventing and shaping the future of education and the web."
Three days in the middle of the week, in another country, it's unlikely I'll be able to go, but damn... I'll certainly follow closely.
The new shiny OSS Bar Camp website is up! University College Dublin, week-end of the 25th and 26th of September. Many awesome people already signed up. Register now!
This is the talk that was hijacked by the release team to make the announcement about the delay in releasing Gnome 3.
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.
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.
The questions part of the talk was interesting albeit a bit tense.
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.
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.
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!
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!
What an awesome, awesome conference this has been.
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!
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 :)
1) Who are you and what do you do?
I'm a software developer from Dublin, Ireland. Passionate about open-source and education.
2) How did you get into GNOME?
Gnome has been the default desktop for most distro I've used. After a while I decided to see if I could help out with something, and found some bugs tagged with gnome-love that I could actually solve, yay! I haven't done much since then though, besides being a happy Gnome-tee-shirt-wearing user.
3) Why are you coming to GUADEC?
I'm hoping to learn more about Gnome, meet some of the awesome people behind the project(s), and build up the confidence to become a stronger contributor myself.
4) In 1 sentence, describe what your most favorite recent GNOME project has been. (Doesn't have to be yours!)
Gnome-terminal. I use it constantly, got my first Gnome patch accepted into that project and seem to stumble upon it all the time (e.g. finding the related gnome-terminal patch on the same site I was using to learn about control sequences.)
...Going over my one sentence, Empathy/Telepathy are pretty cool too. And I'm having a jolly good time learning pyGTK as well!
5) Will this be your first time visiting the Netherlands?
Yes! I didn't leave much buffer time around the conference for tourism though.
Feeling a bit anxious about ash clouds, but looking forward to the conference!
I attended for a couple of hours the Synchronous Hackathon in Tog today. I had vague plans on making progress with the Moodle plug-in, probably related to the unit testing / refactoring of the data crunching methods... Didn't happen, but I did find a new bug, which I managed to fix 10 minutes before my battery went down. Wince-worthy, a couple of global variables (ouch) not being cleared properly in various places, but still -- progress! I'm happy with the day, it was good fun. Now, to see if I can hook Geany saving function to a shell script I have to execute manually each time...
Had an awesome time at OSS Bar Camp yesterday! I attended some awesome talks about healthcare in developing countries, automating documentation, open-source sustainability, SELinux, ZFS/BTRFS, UCD open-source lab... (which I hope to go visit for Irish coding day next week-end, after hearing some awesome things about their facilities.)
As usual, the talks are half the awesomeness of an event, I met (for the first time or again!) and chatted with a lot of very cool people. I guess the main thing that came out of these conversations for me, is that I will set up my course for teaching how to program using Python again next month, for a small group of adults this time. Hee!
Two main things to do before that: "process" the feedback I got from my students the last time and properly extract the 'lessons learnt' on teaching, and then adapt the outline for the new course. I still have to do some thinking about that, the only thing I'm quite sure of right now is that I don't want to do weekly 3-hours-long sessions. :) Quite looking forward to it, having committed to it to several people is quite motivating to get the gears moving.
I'm very glad I was able to attend Python Ireland's March talks meet-up last night, it's the first time (at last!) that I got to hear the Python chaps presenting, some very interesting stuff. Apparently they're doing a "return to the sources" with more introductory talks, after some time of in-depth technical talks that very few people were actually able to get. I think it worked well.
The first presentation was about Jython. Until then I hadn't thought much about it, besides "yeah, Python on the JVM. Why not." Turns out there's some really cool stuff going on there! The seamless Java <-> Python integration evokes a realm of possibilities I hadn't considered before (I thought it simply ran pure Python, I didn't know about it talking with Java and the use of java.lang.reflect.) Jython also integrates with a few Java containers, like JBoss and WebSphere and that's something I definitely want to look into and see how useful it could be in work to help script our build environment. Learning Python version 2.1 should prove interesting...!!
Jython doesn't use the GIL, enabling real multi-threading. Web frameworks can run on it too, some of them tested and confirmed like Django. The thought of Django running on a heavy weight "enterprise" Java container/server brings up a smile, for some reason. All in all a very informative talk, that not only made me want to try out Jython but also dig deeper into the Python language to find out more about some of the concepts that were mentioned.
The second talk was a summary of some sessions from PyCon 2010, quite interactive with the audience asking questions. Some interesting discussions about performance, the GIL (serious case of busy wait on multicore, fixing-in-progress), Unladden Swallow (aiming at 5x better performance and actually getting there, huh. Cool!), an interest in NoSQL databases (tending toward Cassandra and MongoDB rather than CouchDB, interesting), some packaging discussions (highlighting that it was often easier to install (using easy_install) than remove (manually :)). There must be something to learn from the way Linux distributions have been doing it for 15 years now. They're getting there.) Having "poster sessions" for people to present a project without doing an actual presentation is quite an interesting concept. I wonder if this would work for other local conferences, like OSS Bar Camp.
I went to Limerick this week-end to attend the SkyNet/Ubuntu talks. It was good fun, I enjoy so much walking around UL campus and corridors, basking in old memories of when I was just settling in Ireland and was learning so much, all the time :)
The first talk was mostly about selling up Microsoft cloud services, which felt a bit surreal for a mostly open-source audience. I suspect the organisers didn't highlight enough that this particular afternoon of talks was slanted toward Ubuntu and open-source in general, so we definitely weren't the best audience. It's very strange to hear that the cost of computing is coming down at last, then being told that no, it's impractical for businesses to try to switch to free alternatives like OpenOffice, while at the same time mentioning that there won't be any more compatibility issues between .doc and .docx since Microsoft is dropping support for Office 2003 and businesses are forced to upgrade to Office 2007. How does this match the necessity for companies to look at ways to reduce costs, or not being willing to look at compatible alternatives (since they already managed compatibility issues for .doc/.docx issues)?
The second talk was about Google Summer of Code, by the very dynamic Jimmy O'Regan. He insisted a lot on the importance and impact that having a designated mentor has on a new contributor. I'm struggling myself to get involved with open-source communities at the moment (as opposed to projects in themselves), so that's something that's very interesting to think about, and see if perhaps it could be adapted in a scalable way to lower the barrier to involvement for new contributors outside of GSoC.
Right before the lunch break, the folks from Tog had a talk on setting up your own hackerspace. I'm not sure at all we've ironed out all the issues with our own space in Dublin, but it'd certainly be very cool for other cities around Ireland to set up their own so we can all learn from each other's experience, within the Irish culture. I didn't know about the Hackerspaces design patterns, I definitely have some reading to do on that. The main point to take away from the talk IMO: "Try and work on the fun stuff." :)
Matt Zimmerman, CEO of Canonical, gave an interesting talk on the conflicts between managing a community and managing a company, where transparency sometimes is just not possible for legal reasons, and the lessons Canonical learnt and is learning along the way. They're still figuring out the best practices. I like the "anything that could be public, should be" policy, as opposed to the "anything that hasn't been explicitly okayed cannot be talked about" from most other companies. Canonical folks work to earn their commit rights like the rest of the community, they're not granted automatically. Canonical is not doing too bad for transparency because it's grown organically from people working from home so when they need to talk, they do it on Freenode publicly. That's interesting to me because I'm sure I read somewhere (can't remember where though) that one of the problems with the OLPC project was actually having offices, because whether or not you mean to you end up talking about projects, issues and decisions and it looks to the community as if you're working behind closed doors without involving them.
Laura Cza talked about the Ubuntu community, all the ways to get involved and also everything that is going on in Ireland relating to Ubuntu and open-source events. I really look forward to the Free/Open/Global Jam in March! I was a bit spoiled for the talk as I had already read through the slides from the first version of the presentation a couple of weeks back :)
Finally the day ended with a talk on CouchDB, by a presenter who should win some sort of prize for very realistic impressions of heads exploding in the audience not only once but twice. I'm going to have to give a try to CouchDB soon. I probably need to hear a couple more talks about it before I really start getting my mind around the concepts and the "why and when should I use it" (till then I'm doing quite fine with my PostgreSQL adventures!).
