GUADEC 2016 and the Butterfly Effect

Between August 10th to 17th included, I went to the nice city of Karlsruhe for GUADEC 2016.

The Trip to Karlsruhe

I arrived the 10th at 11 P.M. to Karlsruhe's train station after a 9 hours train trip, it was the first time I visited Germany and by night the city was calm and fresh which was nice after such a trip. Before going to the room I rented for the night I made a small detour to meet some gnomies as they were going out of their restaurant, it was nice to see some familiar faces again. :)

The Training Workshops: Discovering GStreamer

The 11th I participated to the GStreamer training workshop held by Olivier Crête, it was a really pleasant experience and I hope there will be more workshops during the next GUADECs!

The Core Days

This year again there were plenty of interesting talks, I won't give details as you can see them by yourself online... That being said, I helped filming some of these talks which was an interesting experience and I am eager to help doing so again the next years!

If you are going to some GUADECs you should really consider volunteering, it enhance the experience a lot for you as you are experiencing it from the inside and for the others as you are helping making it better!

The BoFs

On monday afternoon, the Games BoF went pretty well, with Bastien Nocera and Mathieu Bridon we worked hard on polishing Games:

• we started the work to deprecate and drop the retro-plugins package as maintaining it is a burden to us
• we made gamepads sending proper gamepad events to work out of the box
• we polished some UI elements like the "Resume" dialog
• we started the work to add session inhibitors to avoid the session to lock while you are playing, and to warn you if a running game can't be saved when quitting the session
• ...

We also tried to make Games play nice with Flatpak: we ensured the Flatpak builds correctly, managed to package some Libretro cores with the Flatpak:

• we ensured the Flatpak builds correctly
• we managed to package some Libretro cores with the Flatpak
• we managed to get the gamepads somewhat working
• ...

The result is that now Games is usable as a Flatpak which will make its distribution way easier!

The Social Events

I attended the barbecue on Thursday, the picnic on Friday and the diner at the Hoepfner Burggarten on Sunday and all these events were really fun and well organized.

The Saturday with Bastien and Mathieu we skipped the social event at the Z10 bar to visit the RetroGames e.V, a non-profit organization holding an arcade full of retro cabs. The entrance is €3 and you can play as much as you want so it's really cheap and you can have plenty of fun with their exotic games!

On a sidenote, I recommend you to eat at Casa do José, it was really good. :)

Many Thanks to the Organizers

I want to thank again all the organizers for their awesome work and also the volunteers: this GUADEC was great! :D

Visiting the City

On Tuesday morning I had the chance to visit some parts of the city with Moira who knows it a bit, it allowed me to see the big castle and more importantly the very large park behind it. I will always be amazed by how much the parks and the country can be green and lush in the middle of summer in the North/in the continent. :)

Protip: there are plenty of blackberries in the park.

The zoo is just in front of the train station and it can be crossed for free on a bridge, from there you can see some elephants and by walking aside the zoo you can see some penguins.

Trying to Go Back Home

On Wednesday at 11:30 I took the train back to my hometown of Montpellier... at least that's what I thought! Maybe you remember Jeff's adventures in Frankfurt last year, well I lived something somewhat similar.

This very day a hailstorm hit cities between Montpellier and the nearby city were I grew up, this sudden storm caused a pine to fall on the rails just before Montpellier and a regional train hit it causing all trains between Lyon and Montpellier to stop. At 5:30 P.M. I had to leave the train in Lyon, after some time at the train station's reception desk to gather useful information I learned that traffic was planned to start again on Thursday morning, which implied that I had to pass the night there. Fortunately I have some friends in Lyon like Bastien Nocera and Mathieu Bridon (them again) whose train was planned to arrive a few hours later, hence after warning them I started moving to Mathieu's apartment where his wife received me. It ended up being a pleasant adventure for me as it allowed me to see her again after several months. :)

See you in Manchester!