It was my first GUADEC and yep, those other GNOME developers convinced me they are indeed a great crowd and bunch of insanely cool and friendly people! A real community of friends and guys wanting to create this amazing desktop platform. I’ve never been to such a relax and fun conference. Asking questions to the speaker was like talking in a group, rather than firing a question, getting an answer, etcetera. In the smaller rooms, most questions became little discussions and sharing idea’s. That’s IMHO how a conference like GUADEC should be. And it’s how GUADEC was for me.
As number 44, I even won one of the five Nokia 770’s :). I can’t wait to get it (they are going to send it). I’m sorry for the other guys who also wanted one. I promise I’ll use it good and will contribute stuff for the device. The company where I’m employed is planning to buy a few so that we can investigate and develop specific softwares for our customers.
I’ve met some of the Evolution developers like Harish Krishnaswamy and Parag Goel. I didn’t know the Novell Evolution developers appreciated my little contributions so much. It was nice meeting you guys :-). I also met some of the RedHat Eclipse developers. So who did I meet, lets try to memorise. Andrew Overholt, David Malcolm, Ben Konrath … Hey David: that was a great restaurant you showed us!
I (and the conference) convinced my colleague, Bjorn Monnens, who was with me at GUADEC, to become a member of this GNOME community. He’s a professional Java developer at our company. Every evening in the hotel he started trying out C, asking me questions about autotools and makefiles. Debuggers. Etcetera. He was also very interested in the latest Eclipse stuff. So we’ll have a new developer soon!