GUADEC 2015, part 2: the talks

I was only able to attend a few talks and I’m looking forward to watching the videos of those I missed.

The one I really didn’t want to miss (and I was able to attend) was the keynote by Christian Hergert, “Crafting the developer experience”. I’ve been following closely his work in the past year and tried to give a hand. He’s been doing an amazing job on Builder and is sadly running out of funds. His campaign allowed him to work fulltime on this crucial project, but there’s still a lot to be done so I urge you to buy him some more time by contributing one way or another.

• Money. The campaign page still accepts payments, or you can use other means as explained at the bottom of the page.
• Code. Anything that you can work on won’t have to be done by Chris and he’ll be able to work on something else in the meantime.
• Testing. The more users we get to run the development version, the easier it will be to find issues, and get them fixed.
• Promoting. If you’re already convinced of how great Builder is, maybe you can tell that to your friends and turn them into contributors?

The keynote by Pamela Chestek, “How the power community prevails — It’s not only about the code”, is also a very important talk and I’m glad I could be in the room when it happened. You may have heard of the Groupon story. This talk shows what happened behind the scenes and how the Internet can be so much more efficient than legal action. Pamela really deserves the rounds of applause she got during her talk.

Some other highlights:

• “Behind the release videos” by Bastian Ilsø. It was excellent seeing the journey that lead him to do our promotional videos, and I look forward to watching the 3.18 one.
• “Fast and effective application design: live!” by Allan Day. He wasn’t very confident about doing a live demo of the design process, but he had no reason as he did an excellent job! Very interesting, and hopefully I’ll get to apply some of it in the future.

Closing this post with my talk, “i18n and l10n: why we’re the best (and why we still suck)", seems oddly fitting as it was scheduled on the last slot of the last of the core days. Going right after a combo made of Sri, Bastian and Allan made me feel a bit of pressure. I’m a bit disappointed by my performance, because I feel my rhythm was not good and I was not fluid enough. I was also nervous as I felt I’d have much to cover and I was afraid I would come out of time, but I managed to squeeze almost everything in and the timing was about right. I got many interesting questions from the audience. I finished by advertising the BoF we were having on the next day and which will be covered in part 3.