GUADEC 2014: the aftermath

It’s been more than a week since I am back from GUADEC in Strasbourg, and I must say it was an amazing experience! I went there in the middle of a chaotic time: I had just finished my PhD defense, was helping organize a huge logic conference and, because of this conference, had many friends around and even one at my place. This did not leave me much time to think, which was in fact good. Because if I stop to think about it, I was going to this place I did not know, alone, to meet people I met only over the internet. It sounds like something my parents would strongly oppose, if it was 1999. But it was not, and so I went.

I must say that, coming from a very technical conference, the talks at GUADEC were refreshing. There I was, a complete newbie, able to follow a lot of interesting stuff. But what made me most happy was in fact the people. You know when you are among a group of very cool people and everyone is so nice to you that you just think “I have to be part of this!”? This is how I felt. I got there and I did not know one soul, still people were very friendly and integrating. There was always company for lunch and dinner, and there were always programs for the evening. And in the meantime, I could even program 🙂

Evince’s hackfest on the days before GUADEC was very cool. Not only did I meet my mentor and all the other evincers, but also had progress on the annotation handling. I have a branch now on which annotation works, and we are currently working on optimizing it and organizing the code. Since I found out KaL is the only maintainer, I am trying to make my patches as easy to understand as possible to try and facilitate his work. It is almost certain that these will not be ready to be pushed to master by the end of gsoc, but honestly, I don’t even see this as gsoc anymore. I will continue working on it until it is ready, then I will go trolling for other bugs 😛

It’s funny how things happen sometimes… I enrolled on gsoc because of a career mishap on the beginning of this year. I wanted to prove something, for myself, at least. I listed some projects, some more academic, and gnome, just because I thought it would be so cool to contribute to something I have been using freely for years. My head was already full of science stuff, so I decided to go for gnome. Although academia-oriented people would say it is a waste of time, I do not regret one second. It was a very fulfilling experience, that went way beyond the point I wanted to prove, whatever that was. Maybe it took me some time from research, but I feel like I was doing something that mattered. I felt useful. It feels good 🙂
I wouldn’t like to let that go.

I hope to see you all in Sweden next year!