2023-02-08
FOSDEM 2023
Back to in person’s meetup: talks and slides
Finally that time of the year to meet and greet has arrived with FOSDEM. Hot topics, ingenious ideas and happy campers → all in one city.
LibreOffice Technology
I have been everywhere and nowhere (easy to get lost in time and space during FOSDEM) but LibreOffice Technology (LOTech) track was always a good place to return to with great talks ranging from cautionary tales and history recaps to upcoming and experimental work.
My talks
This year, and because the LOTech track was packed with talks, I have decided to show Collabora Online’s new features and all the work that was done in the last year or so while going through every possible way to customize and test it according to one needs. In short, this talk had the same – Make Collabora Online Yours – name as the one I did at FOSDEM 2020 but they were not one and the same. This year’s talk was an extension of the previous one.
Some of the topics covered: coolwsd.xml; available SDK; cool iframe; how to insert custom buttons; send custom CSS variables; plus ways to contribute to Collabora Online and LibreOffice while checking the new online features.
Oh and since Pranam was unable to travel I ended up speaking on his behalf. A bit unprepared but it helped that I worked with him in these – Feature locking – set of features (he did the main work).
In short this is yet another option to give better control over your server’s used resources and users. Sysadmins and Collabora Online integrators have now better control over what they want to enable or disable and how that should be represented (if visible or completely hidden).
Other stands and talks
Stands, people and talks. From one building to another, it was difficult to keep up but here are some I enjoyed:
Nextcloud stand: chat with Camila; openSUSE stand: Happy to see all the cool stuff around GNU Health, KDE stand: tried out Steam Deck with “specialized Linux distribution for gaming devices, which Valve and Collabora have been working on together for several years”; Ubuntu stand: good to talk with friends and meet /chat with Canonical’s community manager: Philipp Kewisch (in search for some ideas I could steal and use for Collabora Online community).
Penpot “official” launch: insightful presentation by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz displaying a whopping increase in on-premises installations (docker image). Good to see such a fantastic project evolving in feature set and popularity.
All the talks from the Open Source Design devroom (Nimisha Vijay doing the good work there)
Container devroom: Good to keep an eye on what is happening in the container world, I find it helpful when it comes to testing in different environments; Also managed to peek some talks related with JavaScript.
Meeting outside
Always good to have such a cool employer – Michael Meeks, Collabora Productivity – that fosters personal and group development with these kind of events (BTW we are hiring!). I met with other Collaborans. Had drinks, pasta (thanks Italians!) in the TDF dinner/party. Onto another dinner this time with Ubuntu community. Next, I had a blast walking and talking everywhere with Tiago Carrondo and Hugo Peixoto (ANSOL – National Association for Free Software).
Hackfest
Just after FOSDEM, on February 6 / 7 there was an informal LOTech hackfest. I intend to write more about it in the upcoming weeks but in short:
1st day, I had fun hacking on accessKeys for Collabora Online and chatting with Olivier Hallot about yet another nifty project: the Bookshelf (already pushed some fixes but it was invaluable this discussion and the proceeding shared manual from Olivier); Chat with the goodie Gustavo Pacheco about conferences and how to attract more contributors to the Open Source.
2nd day, a whole hackroom for Noel Grandin (thanks for making me company!) and I, worked on some UI fixes and GitHub issues.