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

This is the third in a series (1, 2) of quick updates on travel and meetups I attended this year, for or because of LibreOffice / The Document Foundation.

On March 19-20th already, the 2nd LibreOffice hackfest in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria took place at the ULPGC. Thanks to Fran Santana and the team from the university for hosting us, and my new company CIB for sponsoring food & drinks and diners – and a very significant infusion of people into the LibreOffice ecosystem!

Scheduling was perfect, we reportedly had the worst weather of the year thus far, so sitting down & hacking really was the only alternative. Accordingly, a number of things got done, bugs fixed, and stuff/folks bootstrapped.

There were a few encouraging contacts to local LibreOffice users, and very interesting conversations with students, some of them really new to the ideas, concepts & the way of life inside a FLOSS project.

On a personal note, I’m very happy to report that travelling, and working, with a 1.5 year-old is very much possible in FLOSS land. Both university and hackfest attendees were lovely, understanding, and forgiving LibreBaby the occasional cries of joy (and anger). 🙂

This is the second in a series of quick updates on travel and meetups I attended this year, for or because of LibreOffice / The Document Foundation.

On invitation by Michael and his Collabora crowd, this year saw the first LibreOffice hackfest ever on English soil, conveniently located, and helpfully scheduled in parallel to the annual Cambridge beer festival.

Attendees and host were great, my attention this time evenly split between hacking, personal talks, and very well-organised and entertaining evening activities (see below). I even fixed a bug! 🙂

This is the first in a series of quick updates on travel and meetups I attended this year, for or because of LibreOffice / The Document Foundation.

Thanks to Florian, the German LibreOffice community again had the opportunity to meet in person, to work and plan activities for the coming 12 months. As usual, this meetup took place in the Linux Hotel in Essen, a lovely location, and conveniently placed in the middle of Germany. The event took place a few weeks ago already, during the weekend June 19-21st. Bubli went first, since I could only join Saturday evening due to a conflicting family event.

The meeting was a blast, and with a virtual group like the LibreOffice community, a most welcome (and far too seldom) opportunity to connect in person. The agenda was packed, and a number of activities identified there got started already (IT & Business trade fair, updated flyers).

Martin and Italo, cooking

Sunday morning plenary session

Was great to be there, and very encouraged by the newly-invigorated German LibreOffice community spirit! On that account, and if you’re able to read German: there’s a very nice and in-depth special edition of the iX computer magazine available, covering Office productivity in general and LibreOffice in particular.