GUADEC Archives - Dylan McCall

I attended GUADEC 2024 last month in Denver, Colorado. I thought I’d write about some of the highlights for me.

It was definitely the smallest GUADEC I’ve been to, and it was unusual in some other ways too, such as having several hybrid presentations, with remote and in-person presenters sharing the stage. That took some adjusting, but it worked well, even if I missed some of the energy of past events. (I shared some thoughts about hybrid GUADEC on a Discourse thread).

I felt this GUADEC was really defined by the keynotes. They were great!

First, we had Ryan Stipes from Thunderbird telling us all about Thunderbird’s journey from a somewhat neglected but well-loved side project and on to a thriving self-funded community project: Thunderbird, The Death and Rebirth of an OSS Project (YouTube). He had a lot to say about the value of metrics to measure the impact of certain features and target platforms, which really resonated with people. (It is interesting to note, for instance, there appear to be more Thunderbird users using Windows 8.1 than Linux). He also had a lot to say about the success Thunderbird had just being direct and asking users for money.

Much of this success comes from Thunderbird doing a good job telling its own story. People clearly understand what Thunderbird is doing for them. And there was plenty of talk for the next few days: what does it mean for GNOME to own its story?

I also really enjoyed Stephanie Taylor’s keynote, all about Google Summer of Code (which started 20 years ago now!): Google Summer of Code 20 years of OSS Mentorship (YouTube). It just made me super happy as a GSoC alumni (one of thousands!) to see that program continuing to do so much good, and how much mentorship in open source has grown over the years.

Scott Jenson’s presentation, How can GNOME explore bigger concepts? (YouTube), is another really important watch. Scott’s advice about breaking free from traps like constraint thinking really resonated with me, especially his suggestion to, at first, treat the software like it is magic and see where that leads.

That approach reminds me of how software improves in implementation, as well. It is natural for a codebase to start off with a whole bunch of “do magic” stub functions, then slowly morph into a chaotic mess until finally it turns into something that actually might just work. And getting to that last step usually involves deleting a lot of code, after it turns out you never needed all that much magic. But you have to be patient with the chaos to get there. You have to believe in it.

A photograph taken inside the Tivoli Student Union building in Denver, Colorado. The picture is taken from the third level, looking down to the first level. There is a staircase with green railings which winds slightly from the bottom of the frame to the left of the frame.

A photograph taken inside one of the rooms inside the Tivoli Student Union building at Denver, Colorado. The photograph is looking up at a very high ceiling. The walls are brick, with windows that are rounded on top.

Speaking of magic, there is so much around GNOME that is exciting right now, so I spent some time just being excited about things.

I am always grateful for presentations about GTK and font rendering, which was satisfied on Friday with GTK’s new renderers – a deep dive (YouTube), and later with Advances in Font Technology (YouTube) – all great to watch if you’re interested in rendering stuff, or just fun Unicode trivia.
Eitan Isaacson talked about Spiel, a modern speech synthesis system: The Whole Spiel – A New Speech Synthesis API (YouTube). I loved his examples showing how it is important to satisfy several very different use cases for speech synthesis. While one user may value the precision of eSpeak at chipmunk speed, another user would prefer their computer talks like a human. And if we can get speech synthesis working well for non-accessibility reasons, there’s a real curb cut effect that should benefit everyone, including people who are just starting to use accessibility tools.
I went to the newest edition of Jonathan Blandford and Federico Mena Quintero’s presentation about Crosswords, GNOME Crosswords, Year Three (YouTube). It was abridged due to the format, but I especially enjoyed learning about the MVC-like data model for the application. It would be neat to see more GNOME apps using the same pattern.
There was a lot to learn about GNOME OS and OpenQA testing. The process for a new developer to get into hacking on a GNOME system component tends to be really awkward – particularly if that developer doesn’t want to mess up their host system. So You’re always breaking GNOME (YouTube) got me pretty excited about what’s coming with GNOME OS and sysext, as well as for testing in general. The OpenQA workshop on Monday was also well attended. Some people were unclear what openqa.gnome.org was doing, or what it can do for them. Just stepping through some conveniently broken tests and fixing them together was an excellent way to demystify the thing.
Also the lightning talks are good. Always watch the lightning talks.

Much of this work is being helped along with the Sovereign Tech Fund. This is the GUADEC where a lot of that is up for show, and I think it’s amazing to see so many quiet but high impact projects finally getting the attention (and funding) they deserve.

Outside of the event, it was great hanging out around Denver with all sorts of GNOME folks. I loved how many restaurants were perfectly happy to accommodate giant mobs of people. We saw huge mountains, the Colorado Rockies winning a baseball game, surprisingly good karaoke, and some very unique bars. On the last day, a large contingent of us headed to Meow Wolf, which was just a ridiculously fun way to spend a few hours. It reminded me of a point and click adventure game in the style of Myst and Riven, in all the best ways.

I was also suitably impressed by the 35 minute walk from where I was staying, around Empower Field, over the South Platte River, under some giant highway … which was actually entirely pleasant, for North America. This part of Denver has plenty of pedestrian bridges, which are both nice to walk along and really helpful to guide pedestrians through certain areas, so for me the obvious walking routes were completely different from (and as efficient as) the obvious driving routes.

A photograph of the South Platte River in Denver, Colorado, viewed from a pedestrian bridge along the South Platte River Trail. There are thin trees on either side of the river, a paved path on the right side, and two bridges in the background. There is a medium sized concrete building on the left side with a colourful sign that says "Meow Wolf."

A photograph taken along the South Platte River trail in Denver, Colorado. There is a straight train track on the left side, continuing running into the distance. It is parallel to a smooth paved path for pedestrians and bicycles. Between them, there is gravel, and an orange traffic cone. In the background, there is a bridge, and some tall apartment buildings.

The GUADEC dinner was, for me, the ideal GUADEC dinner. It was right there at the venue, at the same brewery people had been going to every day – but this time with free tacos! I truly appreciated the consistency there, for Denver has good beer and good tacos. I also appreciated that we were set up both inside and outside, at nice big tables with plenty of room for people to sit. It helped me to feel comfortable, and it was great for people who were there with families (which meant I got to meet said families!). It reminded me of the GUADEC 2022 taco party. An event like this really shines when people are moving around, and there was a lot of it here.

A photograph of several people gathered around a pinball machine.

A photograph of a small glass of very dark beer. The glass says "Westbound Brewing Company" in black letters. The beer is sitting on a wooden table, and there are two people out of focus in the background.

It turns out I didn’t take many pictures this year, but the official ones are better anyway. I did, however, take far too many pictures from the train ride home: I rode Amtrak, mostly for fun, on California Zephyr from Denver to Sacramento; then Coast Starlight from Sacramento to Seattle; and the smaller Cascades train from Seattle to Vancouver. It was beautiful, and seriously I think everyone should have the opportunity to try an overnight roomette on the Zephyr. My favourite part was sitting in the spacious observation car watching the world go by, getting only the tiniest amount of work done. I found tons of fun people to talk to, which I don’t usually do, but something about that space made it oddly comfortable. Everyone there was happy and sociable and relaxed. And I guess I was still in conference mode.

A photograph of an Amtrak train stopped at Denver Union Station in Denver, Colorado.

A photograph from the dining car in the California Zephyr train. The picture shows the view out the window as the train departs from Denver, Colorado.

I returned home refreshed and excited for where GNOME is heading, especially with new progress around accessibility and developer tools. And with plenty of ideas for little projects I can work on this year.

Thanks to all the awesome people who make GUADEC happen, as well as my employer, Endless OS Foundation, for giving me the opportunity to spend several work days meeting people from around the GNOME community and wandering around Denver.

I spent a week at GUADEC 2022 in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was an excellent conference, with some good talks, good people, and a delightful hallway track. I think everyone was excited to see each other in person after so long, and for many attendees, this was closer to home than GUADEC has ever been.

For this event, I was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, so many thanks to them as well as my employer the Endless OS Foundation for both encouraging me to submit a talk and for giving me the opportunity to take off and drink tequila for the week.

For me, the big themes this GUADEC were information resilience, scaling our community, and how these topics fit together.

Introductions

Stepping into the Guadalajara Connectory for the first time, I couldn’t help but feel a little out of place. Everyone was incredibly welcoming, but this was still my first GUADEC, and my first real in-person event with the desktop Linux community in ages.

So, I was happy to come across Jona Azizaj and Justin Flory’s series of thoughtful and inviting workshops on Wednesday morning. These were Icebreakers & Community Social, followed by Unconscious bias & imposter syndrome workshop. They eased my anxiety enough that I wandered off and missed the follow-up (Exploring privilege dynamics workshop), but it looked like a cool session. It was a brilliant idea to put these kinds of sessions right at the start.

The workshop about unconscious bias inspired me to consciously mix up who I was going out for lunch with throughout the week, as I realized how easy it is to create bubbles without thinking about it.

Beyond that, I attended quite a few interesting sessions. It is always fun hearing about bits of the software stack I’m unfamiliar with, so some standouts were Matthias Clasen’s Font rendering in GNOME (YouTube), and David King’s Cheese strings: Webcams, PipeWire and portals (YouTube). Both highly recommended if you are interested in those components, or in learning about some clever things!

But for the most part, this wasn’t a very code-oriented conference for me.

Accessibility, diversity, remote attendance

This was the first hybrid GUADEC after two years of running a virtual-only conference, and I think the format worked very well. The remote-related stuff was smoothly handled in the background. The volunteers in each room did a great job relaying questions from chat so remote attendees were represented during Q&As.

I did wish that those remote attendees — especially the Berlin Mini-GUADEC — were more visible in other contexts. If this format sticks, it would be nice to have a device or two set up so people in different venues can see and interact with each other during the event. After all, it is unlikely that in-person attendees will spend much time looking at chat rooms on their own.

But I definitely like how this looks. I think having good representation for remote attendees is important for accessibility. Pandemic or otherwise. So with that in mind, Robin Tafel’s Keynote: Peeling Vegetables and the Craft of (Software) Inclusivity (YouTube), struck a chord for me. She elegantly explains how making anything more accessible — from vegetable peelers to sidewalks to software — comes back to help all of us in a variety of ways: increased diversity, better designs in general, and — let’s face it — a huge number of people will need accessibility tools at some point in their lives.

“We are temporarily abled.”

Community, ecosystems, and offline content

I especially enjoyed Sri Ramkrishna’s thoughtful talk, GNOME and Sustainability – Ecosystem Management (YouTube). I came away from his session thinking how we don’t just need to recruit GNOME contributors; we need to connect free software ecosystems horizontally. Find those like-minded people in other projects and find places where we can collaborate, even if we aren’t all using GNOME as a desktop environment. For instance, I think we’re doing a great job of this across the freedesktop world, but it’s something we could think about more widely, too.

Who else benefits, or could benefit, from Meson, BuildStream, Flatpak, GJS, and the many other technologies GNOME champions? How can we advocate for these technologies in other communities and use those as bridges for each other’s benefit? How do we get their voices at events like GUADEC, and what stops us from lending our voices to theirs?

“We need to grow and feed our ecosystem, and build relations with other ecosystems.”

So I was pretty excited (mostly anxious, since I needed to use printed notes and there were no podiums, but also excited) to be doing a session with Manuel Quiñones a few hours later: Offline learning with GNOME and Kolibri (YouTube). I’ll write a more detailed blog post about it later on, but I didn’t anticipate quite how neatly our session would fit in with what other people were talking about.

At Endless, we have been working with offline content for a long time. We build custom Endless OS images designed for different contexts, with massive libraries of pre-installed educational resources. Resources like Wikipedia, books, educational games, and more: all selected to empower people with limited connectivity. The trick with offline content is it involves a whole lot of very large files, it needs to be possible to update it, and it needs to be easy to rapidly customize it for different deployments.

That becomes expensive to maintain, which is why we have started working with Kolibri.

Kolibri is an open source platform for offline-first teaching and learning, with a powerful local application and a huge library of freely licensed educational content. Like Endless OS, it is designed for difficult use cases. For example, a community with sporadic internet access can use Kolibri to share Khan Academy videos and exercises, as well as assignments for individual learners, between devices.

Using Kolibri instead of our older in-house solution means we can collaborate with an existing free software project that is dedicated to offline content. In turn, we are learning many interesting lessons as we build the Kolibri desktop app for GNOME. We hope those lessons will feed back into the Kolibri project to improve how it works on other platforms, too.

Giving our talk at GUADEC made me think about how there is a lot to gain when we bring these types of projects together.

The hallway track

Like I wrote earlier, this wasn’t a particularly code-oriented conference for me. I did sit down and poke at Break Timer for a while — in particular, reviving a branch with a GTK 4 port — and I had some nice chats about various other projects people are doing. (GNOME Crosswords was the silent star of the show). But I didn’t find many opportunities to actively collaborate on things. Something to aim for with my next GUADEC.

I wonder if the early 3pm stop each day was a bit of a contributor there, but it did make for some excellent outings, so I’m not complaining. The pictures say a lot!

Everyone here is amazing, humble and kind. I really cannot recommend enough, if you are interested in GNOME, check out GUADEC, or LAS, or another such event. It was tremendously valuable to be here and meet such a wide range of GNOME users and contributors. I came away with a better understanding of what I can do to contribute, and a renewed appreciation for this community.