Looking forward to FOSDEM

For the second time in my life I’ll be attending FOSDEM in Brussels, beginning of February. I’m looking forward to it because it’s a very rich event that exposes diversity of the FOSS communities through lots of presentations given by tons of projects. It’ll be great to run into friends as well.

We’ll give a talk on the People framework in the GNOME devroom on Saturday, 7. It’s been a while I really produced work on People, mostly because of active life adaptation and energy spent at work (I’m working for TANDBERG in Oslo, Norway since September 2008). Giving a talk hopefully provides me with enough motivation to make things move forward.

The goal for us is to quickly (well, before the event) have a usable and installable framework, providing a daemon, application libraries and a useful set of contact sources. Following my thoughts exposed in a previous post, and considering that we are presenting towards the GNOME community, we hope to demonstrate some hot integration with components of this desktop ecosystem, such as Empathy.

See you there!

FOSDEM and other cool stuff

So, lots of good things are happening to me these times. Well, I guess.

Studies are soon-to-be-finished and I actually began my final year internship that ends in June, when I’ll graduate. For one week now, I have been a trainee at Nokia, Helsinki (Finland). This is quite a big move for me, since I never really left France until now. I’m really enjoying that new environment, this is challenging to adapt, on a personal side. I’m working in the OSSO Multimedia team at Nokia and I got surprised of how my arrival went well, people are really cool and I’m enjoying to be there, that’s a great opportunity to learn from them and actually discover the “big company” world, even using open source technologies. I’m sure that experience will bring me a lot and I’m not waiting for less on that.

So it’s Sunday night and I’m in Brussels (Belgium), spending some cool time with friends in the hotel hall. That was my first FOSDEM and I enjoyed it. Well, the classic thing about FOSDEM is to say that it was too short, and it was, but I can add my very own observations as well. The top advantage of such conferences is to gather and share some words with cool and respected people that you already know, like the Collabora crew and the GNOME community or meet with guys you aspire to share with, like the Vala developers. It’s also still refreshing to spend time with friends that are usually just too far away from you. FOSDEM is just maybe too subject-wide and not a lot of the talks grabbed my attention. As a comparison, GUADEC talks were a far lot more oriented to my fields of interest.

That conference was also the opportunity for Ali and I to share a bit about the project we’re working on, People. People is an unified address book management framework and I’ll blog about it very soon.

Tomorrow morning I fly back to Helsinki and try to begin well my second week there. The real difficult thing is to keep myself alive (i.e. feeding and basic other things like that) but I enjoy the freedom I have there and all the free time I can use (to hack a lot on People, eventually).