GUADEC 2019

I arrived for GUADEC on the 22nd and rushed from the hostel to the 10th annual Womens' Dinner. The dinner was held at a local restaurant and we had balloons, lots of shared appetizers, and vanilla fondant spoon sweets  :) Perhaps because the dinner was held before GUADEC, it was very small this year. As always, though, there was a lively conversation and it was great to catch up with old friends and meet new women in the community.

On the first day of GUADEC Manuel Quiñones and I gave a talk on the work that we did on the Hack Computer. It was nice to share the process  of preparing and practicing the talk with one of my old teammates. We introduced the Hack system, and then we each covered the components we had worked on in more depth. I gave a basic outline of the responsibilities of the toolbox. I also discussed some of the thornier issues in the ToolBox component of Hack, like type checking and post-condition validation in JavaScript. When we were putting together the talk I was struck by how the design (both technical and visual) made the Hack project more than the sum of its parts -- it created an imaginative, engaging space where disparate parts of the system worked seamlessly in concert.

When I booked my travel I was still working at Hack, so I had expected to spend time hacking with my co-workers. However, since I am now at a different company that is not related to GNOME I had time to relax and enjoy the conference and the beautiful (and incredibly warm) city of Thessaloniki. The keynote on GNU Health was very thought-provoking, but I was left with some unanswered questions about patient privacy. During the BoF days, I spent some time working on a custom Django app for the Travel Committee. Luckily, though, we spoke with Neil during our meeting on the afternoon of the first day and he told us that some customizations can be added to GNOME's Odoo instance and it will provide us with all the functionality we need. So hopefully before next GUADEC we will have a new, easier system for submitting, processing, and tracking travel sponsorship requests! Since I didn't have to work on the Travel Committee app, that freed up some of my time and I spent a bit of it getting JHBuild set up so I could start on a GJS bug with the help of Philip Chimento.

Thanks to Endless for paying for my plane tickets and the GNOME Foundation for funding my accommodations. Hope to see you all at the next GUADEC!