Present Perfect

GUADEC

On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event, because last year and Boston was so much fun and such a great experience. And in the last two months before GUADEC, I started to feel less and less enthusiastic about coming, for various reasons.

But now I'm here, and I just got back from the pub, and I listened in on lots of conversations, and talked to lots of people, and it just dawned on me that GNOME really IS a community and there are real people hidden behind the About box that write the software I have come to use every day.

And I might not always agree with all of them or just generally not have a clue about what it is they are doing, but I tend to notice that on the whole the software I use every day is getting better and better.

And as I walk round the pub, with Nat singing in my ear behind me, and Gman getting a round of applause for his truly EXCELLENT work on organising all of this, and people having a good time and slowly getting slightly drunk, I look around. And I see the person that writes my window manager and a whole bunch of other stuff, and I see the guys that write my file manager, and the guy that employs one of them, and the guy that writes my new software installer, and the guy that is responsible for tying all those releases together, and the guy that uses GStreamer to rip CD's, and so on.

And I see that these are the people that write my desktop, and over time I am becoming one of them, and these are all good people sharing a common goal And I got to know them and trust me when I say that they can be trusted to do the best possible job, whether employed by a company or in their free time. And I look around, and I see that it's all good, and tomorrow there will be more of us, and what we are doing makes sense.

And I'll probably re-read this all tomorrow morning before posting and think that I didn't write anything coherent or useful at all, but since I'm promising myself now to go ahead and post it anyway tomorrow, it'll be out there. It might seem silly or sentimental, but it feels good to be a part of it, and it is just as much relevant to everything being said here as anything.

Having a purpose and feeling good about that purpose and the people you're sharing those purposes with is what makes the difference between working on something once in a while and wanting to be a part of it.

Next day

I'm not even going to bother rereading what I wrote. Felt really sick again this morning, waited for it to pass. Then went into Trinity, bought three CD's (I can hardly pass by record stores without getting something), and then went for the killer: two PlayStation 2 dancemats. They're impossible to get in Belgium, so ...

GUADEC On the whole I feel this GUADEC is even better than the one last year. It's funny - I spent a lot of time looking forward to this event,...