Thorsten's Weblog

This is the fourth (and last) in a series (1, 2, 3) of quick updates on travel and meetups I attended this year, for or because of LibreOffice / The Document Foundation. The next LibreOffice event you’ll definitely meet me will be the annual LibreOffice conference, this time in Aarhus, Denmark, on Sep. 23-25th.

As I keep saying every year, FOSDEM is really the FLOSS event to go for me. If I could attend only one, I’d be hard pressed to choose between LibOCon and FOSDEM – it is that great. Fortunately, that hard choice is not upon me. The TDF board therefore uses FOSDEM for one of the two in-person board meetings (the other one being during LibOCon) per year, and also tries to have a hackfest adjacent to it. Which is rather economic on travel, since lots of people are around already.

The LibreOffice project was again co-running the Open Document Editors devroom, and this time, we hit some true home runs. Especially for the mobile topics, the room was full to the gunwales. I was looking after our own small lightning talks track, with the following talks (slides linked):

• Jos van den Oever about font embedding in ODF (slides/demo)
• Asheesh Laroia about ODF support in EtherCalc (slides)
• Your truly with the Nice Slides in Seconds! pitch (slides, /code)

Next to looking after LibreBaby and socializing with tons of people on the hallways, I attended only a few talks myself. Beyond our own dev room stuff, I recall a home-made GPS watch talk, and one about making your tests fail via randomized parameterization, which were both great.

The monday after, we had a full day of TDF board meetings (good progress there on annual budget planning, and a number of smaller items), and the UX hackfest in parallel. I used the opportunity to corner both Michael M. and Michael S. on ODF topics, with now hopefully much better mutual alignment. On the actual hacking front, I spent most of the time finishing up my markdown slide generator project, the result of which was mentioned on this blog already.

Pair programming, UX hackfest