And not only I have participated in the Akademy 2017 conference but got to GUADEC 2017 all in the same week! And, god, I really loved it too because it’s the first GUADEC I attend since The Hague in 2010 and I loved to meet again with old friends of the Hispanic community. Important to say I missed a lot of you, guys. Hope we’ll fix this next year ;-)

I should acknowledge the travel sponsorship by the GNOME Foundation and the GNOME Hispano association. Without them I couldn’t attend this year.

And the main reason to travel to Manchester has been the announcement of the hosting city for GUADEC 2018: Almería. We competed againts the city of Lyon leaded by the hacker extraordinaire Bastien Nocera but finally the GNOME board honored us with the privilege. We put a lot of work on the Almería candicacy but haven’t been easy to compete with the Lyon bid. And thanks to Bastien and team too for their commitment too.

At Manchester’s GUADEC

Organization team had made a greeeat work of love with everything I’m aware. The venue and the dormitory were really very good. The spaces for workshops ideal too. The number of audience attendees this year has beaten the record of the last editions and the quality of speakers at the best level you could expect.

To point some defect just say the dormitory mattresses were not as good as the rest of the facilities ;-)

About conference contents, trying to remark something, to me has been:

GNOME 20th birthday

Yeah, 20 years since GNOME was founded: https://x.com/olea/status/891286593742548992

(and by the way, seems this has been my most popular tweet ever!)

And Jonathan Bladford delighted us with a retrospective of all these years:

https://x.com/blandford/status/891324587757228032

And we had not only a 20 years party but the celebration of founder Federico Mena’s birthday, so he made the honours cuting the celebration cake:

https://x.com/mariospr/status/891420413854720002

And yes, Miguel, we missed you too :-)

Flatpak

To me this has been the Flatpak conference. Most of my Linux experience has been related to software packaging and distro integration but didn’t have the time to deep into Flatpak use and at Manchester had the oportunity to dedicate time to learn about the future of opensource packaging:

https://x.com/olea/status/892056458933788672

And at the workshops session Flatpak leader Alex Larsson among others guided us in our first steps on this technology. To me was the continuation of Aleix Pol flatpak masterclass at Akademy 2017.

About my interest in Flatpak, my main goal is migrating the packaging I “keep” at Fedora of the great OmegaT translation memory tool (see OmegaT) to flatpak and, probably, publishing at the Flathub application store. The main reason to me is I can’t find the time to fullfill all the Fedora package requirements with all the dependencies OmegaT needs. To me it’s a personal experiment I hope to finish before the end of the summer both to get familiar with Flatpak and to retake my modest commitment to OmegaT project.

Stickers

Yeah: I brought to Almería dozens and dozens of GNOME stickers:

https://x.com/olea/status/892754406323695616

I’ll be sharing all of them in the comming HackLab Almería meetings.

GUADEC 2018

And my personal most emotive moment was the announcement of the city hosting next GUADEC 2018:

https://x.com/olea/status/891955634656206853

We are very grateful to the GNOME board and community for their trust. We are confident we’ll provide a nice Almería experience :-)

Conclusion

It has been a great conference. For many of the attendants have been their best GUADEC in many years. And I don’t doubt about this :-)

If you want to check pictures:

• Google Photos shared folder
• Flickr pool

So GUADEC, «we must say Adios! until we see Almeria once again»:

\o/

PD: just added the reference to the GUADEC 2018 announcement.

Last weeks have been really busy with full inmersion in opensource activites. Here in Almería we had the honour to host the Akademy 2017, the annual KDE project conference and meeting. I’m not really involved in KDE development but had been an extraordinare pleasure being their host. Very kind people very easy to work with in all aspects. Is meeting new people a great surprise? Not at all when you know how opensource development projects and people usually are. But I love to remark how a delight has been to work with them.

Hope they loved being in Almería as well :-)

About the conference we had collected some resources:

• at least a shared folder of pictures
• and a list of press references and coverage.

Acknowledgements

Akademy 2017 has been posible just and thanks an extraordinarie team of kind and hardworking people, specially the core team: Aleix Pol, Albert Astals, Kenny Duffus and Lydia Pintscher. And not to forget the necessary help of local volunteers José María Martínez, Juanjo Salvador, Rafa Aybar and Cristóbal Saraiba.

We should thanks too to Francisco Gil and the University of Almería because their help was decisive for make the event happen.

And special acknowledge to Rubén Gómez who has been crazy enough to propose Almería to host the 2017 edition and the main driving force for the local organization team.

As said, a pleasure and an honour!

Well, «Alea iacta est». The deadline for biding to host GUADEC 2018 closed 4th Jun. And we proposed Almería.

GUADEC is the annual developers conference in the European zone, but with common attendants from Asia and North-South America, of the GNOME Project. This is another step to promote Almería as an international technology place and to estimulate new local techies, approaching students and proffesionals to world-class development communities and to the ethos and practice of opensource development. In the age of a «Github portfolio» as a CV resume for developers, the practice in opensource development it’s probably the best to train new programmers, to enhance their employability, and the learning of development practices along veteran programmers and mature communities. And it’s important to show how opensource software is a key component for our digitally connected society.

Again our legal instrument, absolutely key to these activities, is the UNIA CS students association at the University of Almería. The same association I helped fund in 1993 lives a new golden age thanks to a new group of entusiast members. Their support and collaboration made possible to host PyConES 2016, which, as far as we know, has been the biggest software development conference never made in our city. This conference has been a moral milestone for us and now we feel we can, at least, be hosts of other world-class conferences with the appropiate quality. And another key component of these proposals is the current university campus endownment and the support of the present university gobernm team to which we are grateful for their help and support. This is another step to increase the projection of the University of Almería as an international knowledge hub.

Finally I want to express my hope to do a significative contribution to the GNOME project, which I’m related to for more than a decade. Hopefully for 2018 I would have updated my pending GNOME packages in Fedora 🙈

So, here it is, the Almería candidacy to host GUADEC 2018.