GUADEC 2023

I was lucky enough to attend the 2023 edition of GUADEC in Riga, Latvia.

In a way GUADEC is more fun each year because each time I know more people, have more things to talk about, and also it’s 4 years since my last in-person GNOME event so this one was particularly special.

Where else can you have in-depth conversations about the future of GObject, for example? (The future sounds interesting, by the way).

My main focus was getting everyone interested in end-to-end testing using openQA, which met with quite some success, although there is still some way to go before we can declare the end-to-end testing “production ready”. I will keep working on the remaining tasks in my 1-2 hrs a week that I am sometimes able to spend on it; as always, things will go much faster if and when more folk get involved in the effort. We are in #gnome-os if you want to join in.

You can watch my talk about end-to-end testing with openQA here.

We had a BoF session about desktop search, which was one of the most useful discussions I remember having on this topic, we covered topics all across the GNOME desktop rather than focusing on specific components, breaking free for once from Conway’s Law. I wrote up some of the outcomes here. It’s a good time to get involved in search!

After GUADEC was done I sailed from Liepaja to Lübeck, then had some vacation time around Germany and Italy, including a memorable gig watching the Slackers near lake Garda, finishing at midnight and somehow arriving back to Santiago about 10 hours later via various car, plane, train, etc. Luckily we missed most of the heatwave during the trip. I am only now getting back to work.

Many thanks to the local team who did a great job organising the event (I know first-hand how difficult it is :-), and good luck to Cassidy and the team organising GUADEC 2024 in Denver, USA.

It’s too early to know if I’ll make it to Denver but it’s only fair that us Europeans sometimes do a bit of long haul travelling and dealing with hostile border control authorities, stuff that some GUADEC attendees have to do every single year 🙂