halting problem :: GUADEC 2017

:: ~3 min read

Another year, another GUADEC — my 13th to date. Definitely not getting younger, here. 😉

As usual, it was great to see so many faces, old and new. Lots of faces, as well; attendance has been really good, this year.

The 20th anniversary party was a blast; the venue was brilliant, and watching people going around the tables in order to fill in slots for the raffle tickets was hilarious. I loved every minute of it — even if the ‘90s music was an assault on my teenage years. See above, re: getting older.

The talks were, as usual, stellar. It’s always so hard to chose from the embarrassment of riches that is the submission pool, but every year I think the quality of what ends up on the schedule is so high that I cannot be sad.

Lots and lots of people were happy to see the Endless contingent at the conference; the talks from my colleagues were really well received, and I’m sure we’re going to see even more collaboration spring from the seeds planted this year.


My talk about continuous integration in GNOME was well-received, I think; I had to speed up a bit at the end because I lost time while connecting to the projector (not enough juice when on battery to power the HDMI-over-USB C connector; lesson learned for the next talk). I would have liked to get some more time to explain what I’d like to achieve with Continuous.

Do not disturb the build sheriff

I ended up talking with many people at the unconference days, in any case. If you’re interested in helping out the automated build of GNOME components and to improve the reliability of the project, feel free to drop by on irc.gnome.org (or on Matrix!) in the #testable channel.


The unconference days were also very productive, for me. The GTK+ session was, as usual, a great way to plan ahead for the future; last year we defined the new release cycle for GTK+ and jump start the 4.0 development cycle. This year we drafted a roadmap with the remaining tasks.

I talked about Flatpak, FlatHub, Builder, performance in Mutter and GNOME Shell; I wanted to attend the Rust and GJS sessions, but that would have required the ability to clone myself, or be in more than one place at once.

During the unconference, I was also able to finally finish the GDK-Pixbuf port of the build system to Meson. Testing is very much welcome, before we bin the Autotools build and bring one of the oldest modules in GNOME into the future.

Additionally, I was invited to the GNOME Release Team, mostly to deal with the various continuous integration build issues. This, sadly, does not mean that I’m one step closer to my ascendance as the power mad dictator of all of GNOME, but it means that if there are issues with your module, you have a more-or-less official point of contact.


I can’t wait for GUADEC 2018! See you all in Almería!

guadec gnome conferences activities

Follow me on Mastodon