Chicagoans and GNOME, Part 3

Here is my first-hand report of our third consecutive monthly GNOME hackfest, held on Saturday, the 15th. We had our regular User Group meeting where I presented some of the inner workings of our Flask-based website, and made a note to follow-up with speakers who said that they would speak at events (it is polite to either show up, or say, "Hey, I can't make it - I'm sorry!" right?), but then we got to working on GNOME.

We had a pretty good turn-out, with seven people there as part of the hackfest, and one person even showed up to say, "Oh, you are working on GNOME! I don't like GNOME 3, let me troll you." They initially starting out trolling, but then we got to talking about the new Legacy session in GNOME 3.8 - and they are interested! Face-to-face interaction win.

Aside from the initial need to deploy anti-troll measures, it was a successful event. I worked on Rhythmbox docs, and made six or seven commits to my gitorious repo, someone else was working on GObject code. He eventually got the Go-GTK bindings to compile, but had to pull in the entire Go source tree to do so. He filed a bug. Meg Ford worked on GNOME Documents, focusing on changing and adding permissions on Google Docs from within the GNOME Documents application. Someone else (Matt?) explored Lisp-GTK bindings.

As I mentioned, this was our third monthly hackfest, but our fourth one is scheduled forJanuary 19th. We're slowly building up a community here, so I think we just have to be patient, stay focused and give it time. Meg will be speaking on some core GNOME libraries during the next event - this should be a good talk, and I think the group will be able to do more collaborative projects once we get a better idea of everyone's interests and strengths.

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsorship of food for the event.