For the first time, I joined other users and developers of the GNOME project for the 2026 edition of GUADEC, held this year in A Coruña, Spain. As I am now a more active member of the i18n team, and the one living closest to A Coruña, it made sense that I should to attend this year.

The i18n team has many ongoing projects: enhancing Damned Lies, modernizing the documentation for developers, structuring and documenting our existing processes… All of them benefit from being discussed in person, and being physically present with the people you work with has great value. I had the pleasure of presenting some insights about internationalization in a 40-minute talk, and of leading a BoF I’ll talk about a bit later.

I’m grateful the GNOME Foundation agreed to sponsor my travel, granting me a travel allowance from France to La Coruña by train. The sponsorship covered the travel and accommodation fees! GUADEC 2026 lasted a bit less than a week, from the 16th to the 21st of July, and I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Why attend GUADEC?

GUADEC happening to take place in Europe this year, less than two days by train from home, I could not miss the opportunity to be present with all the people I interact with every day and who build GNOME. I started contributing to GNOME when I was in middle school, thirteen years ago, but I had never had the chance to meet, in person, the people I talk to every day — to support their internationalization work, answer their questions, or ask my own. The last time I had met anyone from the project in person was in 2018, at the RMLL (Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) in Strasbourg.

The conference reminded me of the ones I used to attend when I was a researcher in France. Talks are an opportunity to focus on specific technical or organizational parts of the GNOME project, but I have to admit that a physical conference is just as much an opportunity to talk about work outside the official tracks: in corridors, over lunch, on bus trips… It might be an exaggeration, but it seems I learned more about what users wanted from Damned Lies in these five days than in the six years since I became its maintainer. Most of the time, translators and reviewers — the actual users of Damned Lies — don’t even think about opening an issue when the workflow doesn’t fit their practices. Seeing and talking to Damned Lies users greatly helps its development, and I spent the whole week fixing bugs and implementing the UX and feature changes that were requested.

GNOME internationalization

In a 40-minute talk, I presented the team, the complexity of languages, and some guidelines for GNOME developers. It’s true that most people, developers and non-developers alike, struggle with internationalization, but for a simple reason: we’re not linguists. We mostly don’t know the differences between languages — that some have more than two plural forms, unlike English, that others use inflections to carry grammatical roles, that some are read left to right and others right to left… Even keeping all of this in mind, it’s impossible to avoid every mistake; we make them ourselves too, as i18n team members and developers.

Our goal is nonetheless to enhance accessibility through localization. While internationalization is generally an engineering and design problem, it is the prerequisite for localization to happen. We see localization as an accessibility problem, because what’s the purpose of designing, developing, and sharing free software if the vast majority of the world’s population can’t use it because they don’t read English?

Beyond the talk, I also had the chance to lead a BoF on the role of coordinators on Damned Lies, the GNOME internationalization platform. The discussion naturally grew into a broader conversation about the enhancements to make to Damned Lies over the next cycles. A BoF is a very different exercise from a talk: instead of presenting to an audience, you’re mostly listening and steering a discussion between a dozen people who each hold a different piece of the puzzle. We came out of the session with a clearer picture of what coordinators need from the platform, and a list of concrete improvements to prioritize for the coming cycles — exactly the kind of result that’s hard to reach over a mailing list thread.

I would like to thank Anders and Rafael for their reviews and support, and also Victoria and Денис for taking the necessary time to confirm that my statements about Polish and Russian were accurate!

The people

I met extraordinary people from all backgrounds: students, users, developers, designers, documentation writers, volunteers, and employees of Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and others, both working for GNOME professionally and volunteering in their free time. This mix of people is a catalyst for i strengthens our commitment to one another. Many of us had already built friendships online, through chat and video calls, but meeting in person changes everything.

I cannot mention everybody, but it was a great pleasure to meet you all: Alberto, Allan, Charles, Maria, Petr, Piotr, Philipp, Tau, Zelda and all the people I met during this week.

A Coruña

La Coruña is an impressive city that, like many other metropolises in Spain, is giant, built vertically, open to the sea, and with a rich history. I’d like to personally thank the members of the GPUL, the student association of users and developers of Linux, for their commitment in doing their best to organize the whole conference. Many thanks also go to Kristy and Anisa, and to the people who participated in the organization of the event whom I cannot mention.

We had a pleasant trip to La Coruña with other attendees, eating local food, walking down the streets, and enjoying the sea!

Is it important?

Between the train tickets, the accommodation, and a week away from my day job, GUADEC is not a small investment — neither for me nor for the GNOME Foundation that sponsored it. So, was it worth it?

I’d answer yes, without hesitation. The five days I spent listening to, and mostly talking with, Damned Lies users taught me more about their actual needs than years of reading bug reports ever did. The trust
built over a coffee or a shared meal doesn’t show up in any metric, but it’s what turns a ne people feel comfortable pinging with a question, or a rough idea for how to fix a broken workflow. Sponsorship isn’t a reward for past contributions — it’s an investment that multiplies future ones.

What could be improved

I have a few ideas for improvements for GUADEC next year.

We should enhance remote participation by enabling real interaction between speakers and remote attendees, so that people attending remotely experience the same conference and BoFs as those attending in person. I have no idea how to do it technically speaking, but that might be worth investigating.
We should also compute the carbon footprint of the conference’s emissions. Some might think individual climate change is irrelevant, but that’s good news — we are an organization! As a consequence, I’ll recommend that the travel committee add support for train travel to the sponsorship requirements, even if it means covering one or two extra nights for the trip back and forth. By computing the carbon footprints of our event, we can track them and have objectives to reduce them.