LAS GNOME

The 2018 edition of the LAS GNOME conference happened two weeks ago. I arrived in time for the second day of talks, and left early Sunday.

The conference was small but the group was energized and the talks were engaging. The group was made up of local GNOMErs, developers and designers from the US free software community, developers from KDE, and local students, among others. I was very impressed by the hard work of the volunteers. The weather in Denver was very nice. The venue was a beautiful old mansion situated close to downtown.

 A few of my favorite talks:

It was interesting to hear Aleix Pol's presentation on KDE's approach to integrating Flatpak, Snap, and Packagekit backends into their software center.

Britt Yazel's talk on Research Science and Libre Computing was very thought provoking. He talked about the enormous cost of using proprietary software and the lack of reproducibility of research outcomes due to bugs in software and unknown testing environments. It was fascinating to see the parallels between challenges software engineers themselves face in setting up production and test environments, and those faced by research scientists.

Heidi Ellis and Gregory Hislop's talk, "How Can You Make Your Open Source Project Attractive to Students?" outlined the challenges university professors face in trying to teach open source in the classroom, and how projects can make it easier. It was nice to see that GNOME's newcomers' initiatives already provides many of the necessary things: contact information for mentors, places for newcomers to ask questions, documentation on how to get started, etc.

Amisha Singla's talk on "Guarding the Maps from Vandals" explored the evolution of MapBox's approaches to detecting vandalism. They started with a rules-based approach and human review, and eventually re-wrote their system to use natural language processing and machine learning approaches.

Thanks to all the volunteers whose hard work made the event possible! Hope to see you all again next year.