Status update, 17/02/2023

This month I attended FOSDEM for the first time since 2017. In addition to eating 4 delicious waffles, I had the honour of presenting two talks, the first in the Testing & Automation devroom on Setting up OpenQA testing for GNOME.

GNOME’s initial OpenQA testing is mostly implemented now and it’s already found its first real bug. The next step is getting more folk interested within GNOME, so we can ensure ongoing maintenance of the tests and infra, and ensure a bus factor of > 1. If you see me at GUADEC then I will probably talk to you about OpenQA, be prepared!! 🙂

My second talk was in the Python devroom, on DIY music recommendations. I intermittently develop a set of playlist generation tools named Calliope, and this talk was mostly aiming to inspire people to start similar fun & small projects, using simple AI techniques that you can learn in a weekend, and taking advantage of the amazing resource that is Musicbrainz. It seemed to indeed inspire some of the audience and led to an interesting chat with Rob Kaye of the Metabrainz Foundation – there is more cool stuff on the way from them.

Here’s a fantastic sketch of the talk by Jeroen Heijmans:

^{Talk summary sketch, CC BY-SA 4.0}

I didn’t link to this in the talk, but apropos of nothing here’s an interesting video entitled Why Spotify Will Eventually Fail.

On the Saturday I met up with Carlos Garnacho and gatecrashed the GNOME docs hackfest, discussing various improvements around search in GNOME. Most of these are now waiting for developer time as they are too large to be done in occasional moments of evening and weekend downtime, get in touch if you want to find out more!

I must also shout out Marco Trevisan for showing me where to get a decent meal near Madrid Chamartín station on the way home.

Meanwhile at Codethink I have been getting more involved in marketing. Its a company that exists in two worlds, commercial software services on one side and community-driven open source software on the other, often trying our best to build bridges between the two. There aren’t many marketing graduates who are experts in open source, and neither many experienced software developers who want to work fulltime on managing social media, so we are still figuring out the details…

Anyway, the initial outcome is that Codethink is now on the Fediverse – follow us here! @codethink@social.codethink.co.uk