I've been in A Coruña for this year's GUADEC since Tuesday night, and it rocked. I did a late registration after my first week at Collabora, which is sponsoring my stay here.
I came one day early to participate, as Debian's representative, at the yearly GNOME Advisory Board meeting, for the first time. It was a positive experience, which helped me get a grasp of the “big picture” of what the GNOME Foundation does. I also had the pleasure of visiting Igalia's awesome offices in the city, and puting faces to many names during the meeting.
I presented an overview of Debian's relation to GNOME, how our packaging
team works and what are our goals and biggest problems as a GNOME downstream.
We stirred some good debate as some other Advisory Board members share part
of our problems. I should be posting a summary of what happened there for
debian-project@ldo
as soon as I have the time to scribble it.
I've met with GNOME Hispano people I hadn't seen since 2004 or 2006 in the best case, and catched up with many of them. I've also met many GPUL members I had know for over a decade via IRC, but never had met in person, and it was about time. And of course, I've got to known a good number of my new workmates at Collabora, and had fun with them around the conference, the beach and the numerous post-conference events.
Last, but not least, I ended up participating in the GNOME Olympics, substituting Rodrigo in Team B “Core Dumped”, along with Stefano, John, Bastien, Chema and Adam. WE WON, not thanks to me, but the statistics shine: I've won all FreeFA World Cups I've played :P so here's a PROtip: if you want to win next year, be sure to be my team mate, and more importantly, be sure Adam is not your rival. :)
Unfortunately, I'm only attending the core days so tonight I'll be flying back to Madrid on my way home in València. See you next year! A Coruña is a city that has impressed me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to coming back for some more standard vacation at some point. :)