GUADEC 2019
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Over summer I have been working at a software engineering company in Manchester called Codethink. I've had an amazing summer with them and learnt an awful lot, but one of the highlights of my 3 months has been the opportunity to attend GUADEC; the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, which this year was in The University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece.
GNOME is a free and open-source desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems and is the default environment for most Linux distributions. I had never really worked with open source software before joining Codethink, and had very little experience working with Linux.
As my first conference though, it was an amazing experience. I really enjoyed my time learning about the GNOME community and getting to know the people who are a part of it.
I spent 4 days at the conference. I saw a lot of talks and learnt a lot about GNOME but I also got to enjoy the 35 degree heat and see of lot of Thessaloniki. I can definitely recommend trying gyros and bougatsa :)
As part of the conference, many social events and opportunities to get to know people were organised and I met so many interesting people. I have included some photos which give a better view of what I got up to, but the main part of this post is going to be about the talks.
Despite being so new to this kind of community, I was made to feel very welcome by everyone I met and felt very encouraged to learn more.
I thought I would give a brief overview of some of the talks I saw and what I thought about them. However because of how new I am to some of the topics covered, I’m not particularly familiar with the terminologies and technicalities of some of the talks, so I hope nothing I say is wildly incorrect :)
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| Me with some fellow Codethink employees after an afternoon at the beach :P |
GNHOME AUTTOMQATION
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By Nathan Willis
This talk was based around GNOME’s role in home automation. I actually found it rather interesting even with my lack of knowledge on the subject.
Nathan talked about his own home automation set up and discussed how GNOME desktop could play a meaningful part within it. The main thing I got from this talk was how users could do things on the desktop which may effect their surroundings. This includes things like media playback, where if a video is played on the desktop it could cause background music to pause, or the inclusion of IRC and webcam/microphone within the setup. I really like the idea of this and I think if it became possible could be very successful.
Hack: Embedding Learning Tools in the OS
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By Meg Ford and Manuel QuinonesI wanted to mention this talk as I was looking forward to this one a lot. Hack is an adventure style game which has been created to teach kids how to code and use the terminal etc. I think the idea of using an adventure game like they have is a really good idea. I remember using learning games of a similar style in school which were based around core subjects and with software becoming as widespread as it is, I think something like this would be a great introduction to schools especially. I know that I personally would have very much enjoyed this kind of thing when I was younger (and probably still would now to be honest).
However as interesting as I thought the topic of this talk was, I didn’t gain much else from it. They went on to show snippets of the codebase which was closed sourced and in part felt a bit more like a sales pitch than an intro into how it works/ the use of GNOME within it.
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| Socialising in the evenings :) |
Usability Testing
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By Clarissa Borges
Clarissa had spent her summer as a Google Summer of Code intern and I was really interested in hearing about her work as another intern, and it was interesting to hear about how the GNOME Google summer of code programs work.Her talk was based around the importance of usability testing and how and why it should be used. Before this talk I had never really thought about this kind of testing, but it now seems obvious that it is necessary. Usability testing is essentially a way of testing how useable a software is. It involves watching users try to complete a set of tasks using the software and seeing which areas they struggled with and/or found good.
Clarissa mentioned how it allows the optimisation of a program so that users can complete tasks quickly, have less of a need to learn how to use a program, and means they are more likely to enjoy and continue to use it, which when developing a software for people who do not use computers in the way the developers do, is very important.
She showed us how representative users are necessary with 5 being the optimum number to collect data for a good enough portion without being repetitive.
In the software world, everything now seems to be automated and have a script written for it, but usability testing seems to be one aspect in which interaction with the software is still very much needed, which I found interesting. I wonder whether we will ever reach a point where the human test users could be replaced with robots.
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| One of the talks in the conference room |
GNU HEALTH: The Fight For Our Rights in the
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Public Health System
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By Luis Falcon
In my opinion Luis was an excellent speaker and he was clearly well practised in talking at such events. He kept my full attention the whole way through despite it being the last talk of the day.
GNU Health is a social project based around the idea of freedom and equality within healthcare. The idea is to have one large open-source database allowing doctors to access the medical records of anyone easily whenever needed. I think this could be a really good idea to help with healthcare problems that can arise within poorer communities. In his words, privatisation leads to healthcare becoming a privilege. This is a very true statement and I am all for the work that is being done to combat this.
However as much as I did enjoy the actual talk, I have to comment on the discussion half. Many good points were brought up on the security side of things and Luis’ answers were quite often rather political in the sense that he managed to answer the questions without really answering the questions.
One such comment that stuck with me was the possibility of breach of private data in countries which may not be as accepting as ours. For example it was pointed out that if someone’s sexual preference was included within their records, there was potential that this could lead to that person ending up in major trouble within certain countries where homosexuality is still frowned upon. His reply to this was that the benefits outweigh the risks. In my opinion this is a too big of an issue to be able to say the benefits are greater.
Overall I really like the ideas behind this talk and I would like to see it develop into something amazing, however I think there are a number of issues which need to be thought about carefully before this can happen. This is definitely something I would like to research more.
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| Sunset at the nearby beach |
Building the Gnome Community in Africa
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By StellaMaris Njage and Sigu Magwa
Unfortunately I missed the first half of this talk, and so I can’t say an awful lot about it other than I definitely plan to watch it once it is posted to YouTube.I did manage to catch some of the discussion however, and from what I understood, a major issue with building the community in Africa is people understanding where coding can lead to. They need to know exactly what they will get from it and how they can make a living. Despite people contributing ideas with ways to make it more accessible, it seems there is a larger problem than just having the ability to learn, the key point is that there isn’t always a clear career path when getting into open source software, if this could be provided it seems the community in Africa could grow much more easily.
Free Desktop-sdk Status Update and Future
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Plans
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By Valentin David and Adam Jones
Not at all due to their talk but much more to do with my lack of knowledge, I can’t say I understood much, but nevertheless it was great to see people from Codethink giving talks that inspired such good discussion questions and so much support from the rest of the Codethings!
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| The main auditorium |
Designing GNOME Mobile Apps
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By Tobias Bernard
This talk was based around GNOME apps and how they can be formatted to work on a mobile phone. I didn’t understand an awful lot of the technicalities, however I enjoyed the talk nonetheless, especially because of how enthusiastic Tobias was.
It seemed that designing apps to work on smaller interfaces actually helps with larger interfaces too, and demonstrations were shown with how the apps can adjust to work on the size of the interface without needing individual modes, which I found rather interesting.
As I previously mentioned I am very new to Linux and GNOME environment but I would be super interested in seeing how a GNOME Mobile works.
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| Fellow Codethings at the picnic dinner; one of the social events held by the conference. |
Gitlab - A Year in Review and What Should Come
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Next
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By Sriram RamkrishnaHaving never used Gitlab before starting at Codethink, I found it interesting to hear about the project’s transition to start using it two years ago, as it provided me with a better insight into the benefits it can provide. Gitlab is a web-based tool which allows the storage, version control, building, testing and releasing of application and infrastructure code via continuous delivery pipelines. It essentially allows multiple users to work on a project at once while allowing the access of previous versions, and changes to be controlled as to not cause any conflicts in the code.
Sriram talked about the positive impacts that have come from the change: having more control over commit privileges for example, and merge requests being posted on social media.
This provides a greater visibility, which has led to an increase in community participation and whilst in some cases can also lead to controversy, this is essentially is a positive thing, and I agree with his viewpoint that the more open and visible GNOME is, the more successful it will be. For developers there have also been positive impacts. Workflows have become more efficient and there is a possibility of more complex workflows and better CI testing.
He then went on to talk about some of the upcoming features soon to be available, along with some ideas. A couple of the points that I picked up on were multi-project CI pipelines, which seemed to be a really positive inclusion, and from the releases section of the talk, the inclusion of videos and images alongside the releases. As someone who is not as well versed in Gitlab, I like the idea of this kind of visual engagement. The use of bots within documenting issues was also brought up in the discussion, which seems like a good idea.
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| Morning view of Thessaloniki |
If you read this far thankyou! I hope I managed to give a little insight into the software world as I know before my internship I myself didn't realise how many different areas software is involved in!
From healthcare to education to high level developing tools, the GNOME community is involved in so much and has so many different goals and I am super grateful to Codethink for letting me be a part of it this summer!
Stay Spacey,
Beck
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