GUADEC 2010 debrief

I’m on the subway in ny , heading home from GUADEC in The Hague, Netherlands. First things first — a huge thank you to the gnome foundation for helping sponsor my attendance, and to all the conference’s fantastic sponsors.

Some highlights:

• Produced a introspection->docbook documentation generator which is in a branch on gobject introspection, potentially replacing the gtkdoc c scanner.

• Keyword argument support in pygobject is en route.

• Gnome Shell looks awesome

• People seemed interested in general in introspection, which is fantastic.

• ‘Super Platforms’ seemed to steal the show. Technologies like DBus and Telepathy are, rightfully, the talk of the town and people are doing awesome things with them.

• Some hackers are weird, others are some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

• LOTS of N900s… Although people in general were not as excited about N900/Maemo/Meego as I would’ve expected. Somewhat contradictory there, the ubiquity of both the device and at the same time the dislike of the device. Or perhaps the two just go hand in hand.

Some lowlights:

• I really did not enjoy the ‘anti-canonical’ vibe I got throughout the conference. I felt people were more upset at Canonical than KDE or Microsoft, which is weird for a Gnome summit. Less negativity across the board would be nice.

• Europe is far away, perhaps I’ll find a way to make it to the Boston summit, a bit closer!

• Everybody seems to be falling in love with the web, which is nice, but I don’t believe that javascript will come to dominate the desktop — simply because devs like to chose their language (and many will not chose javascript if given the choice, myself included).

All in all GUADEC was a ton of fun and very educational for me. It’s also nice to network with some of the really famous people in this space who have done things like write pulseaudio (<3 Lenhart) or the Shell (Colin's mom).

Cheers!