I would first like to mention and thank everyone for being so welcoming and open-minded to the interns and for the non-interns who also attended GUADEC for the first time. I hope to become a familiar face to everyone.

The GNOME Foundation clearly goes out of their way to gather as many people as can attend to update the platform on updates and projects occurring within the ecosystem. This conference was hosted at the Facultade de Informática at the Universidade da Coruña, in A Coruña, Spain. Both me, and my fiancé, Michael Calabrese, received the GNOME travel grant, which chiefly covered our expenses of travel and accommodations.

Conference

All of the talks were informative and interesting to attend, however a couple that stood out to me were:

One Daemon to Rule Them All: Cross-Desktop Credential Management with OO7

OO7 is a Rust implementation of the Freedesktop Secret Service. It aims to replace the older GNOME Keyring and KWallet, with an actively maintained secret storage service that uses a unified API to precisely select credentials. The current keyring and wallet method stores all one’s information is stored in one single place, making it limiting when attempting to switch between different desktop environments. Instead, OO7 uses libsecret to encrypt individual pieces of information rather than an entire keyring. This allows specific credentials to be unlocked, while others stay locked.

State of GNOME OS

This talk highlighted recent improvements made to GNOME Operating System, particularly over the image-based development/system. Instead of updating packages one by one, you can get what was built and tested in a single update. One interesting thing about GNOME OS is its migration to mobile phones. This talk covered expanding hardware support and improving the testing in order to strengthen the migration and support to a span of devices.

Intern Lightning Talks

I had a talk myself too. Interns were given the opportunity to talk about their project and progress at that point in time. The intern lightning talk can be found here .

GSOC

Felipe Borges mentioned during an outreach and internship meeting that the intended purpose of Outreachy and Google Summer of Code (interning at GNOME in general) is to not only improve your current skills in programming, but to train you to become a maintainer for that repository your project is correlated with.

I met my other mentor, Federico Mena Quintero, in person at the conference. Quintero welcomed me very openly, and offered to help me review my code and offer his perspective towards improving and the constraints of the vocab-crossword project. Quintero guided me towards writing unit tests for the existing backend functions that I wrote. All are welcome to look at what the progress on my project looks like, and review or comments are welcome towards any detail. This is the Gitlab MR that hosts the current backend.

Outside of the Conference

It is no doubt that the chosen city was wonderful. There was delicious seafood, traditional Spanish and Galician food, beautiful architecture, beaches, and lovely weather. The coordinators of GUADEC planned a dinner event that all attendees were welcome to. I went and had a great time listening to the stories and projects of members I hadn’t yet personally met. Members also individually coordinated get-togethers on the GUADEC Matrix channel, allowing for multiple options of gathering together at social events based on personal taste.

Of course, the Spain vs. Argentina game was playing on one of the days of the conference, so I had to go! Like most European city centers, A Coruña set up a large screen in their main plaza to host a public viewing of the game. It was a very unique experience to chant with Spaniards, watch people pop champagne in excitement or groan loudly when distressed, and feel surrounded by the local culture.

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for this overall experience and for giving me a shot as an intern, and Google Summer of Code for offering thorough and exceptional mentorship in open-source.

More photos about our experience is linked to this Flikr .