Fractal hackfest in Strasbourg

As Planet GNOME readers should be aware of by now 😉 we had a Fractal hackfest last week. I organised it with the help of Tobias and I want to thank all the parties that not only made it possible, but also made it an awesome event:

• Epitech, the software engineering school where we had GUADEC in 2014, provided the venue
• Purism sponsored the snacks and sent people to attend
• the GNOME Foundation sponsored travel for some attendees and a dinner
• AIUS took care of the catering on the first day, and also kindly lent us a kettle and coffee maker.

We were lucky to have Matthew from the core Matrix team with us for half of the event to answer our technical questions and help us steer our ship in the right direction.

I got involved with the discussions on various topics but as these have already been covered at length by the other attendees I will focus on some other stuff I managed to do. The first one is the one I’m the most happy about: I brought Quentin, a local student (sitting next to me on the picture), and he made his first GNOME contribution, which happened to be merge request !100 in Fractal 🎉. I also managed to write some code and make some progress on a few things. I landed the changes on generated avatars for users and rooms that don’t have one set, and started working on a couple of other contributions which should be finished in the near future. Keep an eye on the commit log to see them as they happen! 😊 I’m happy with what we have achieved so far and I’m looking forward 🤩 to more good things coming soon.

Apart from the technical side of things, I also tried to act as a city guide and hope my guests liked the places I took them. I for sure had lots of fun hanging out with all those people!