Bossa conference 2009.

I’m in Porto de Galinhas near Recife in Brazil right now, where I’ll be
keynoting at Bossa Conference later today. I’ve been flying in last Thursday from Amsterdam via Lisbon, where I already met some Trolls (Andreas (QGraphicsView), Marius (QItemViews) and Simon (QWebkit)). After a good flight (I got four free seats in a row, which translated to “lie down and sleep as much as you can” to me), we arrived in warm and sunny Brazil. It’s about 30 degrees here, and it’s spot on summer (spot on winter would mean 26 degrees C, since Recife is only 8 degrees south of the equator). On Friday, we visited the INdT office close to our appartment, and on Saturday the iNdT guys took us to Bora Bora, a piece of beach 2 hours south of Recife that welcomes you to paradise. Can’t really argue with that. :-)

On Sunday, the “conference improper” began with a welcome and drinks in the evening so everybody was able to have a fresh start on Monday. Sandro opened the conference with being interrupted by a bunch of Brazilian dancers, I guess everybody was pretty much awake after the drums on dancing.

The conference itself strikes a very nice balance between interesting talks, interesting conversations with interesting people, all that in a very relaxed environment. It takes place in a beach resort, basically a small village with a large swimming pool landscape in its center. The conference and hotel staff is making sure that everything is running smoothly and nobody seems to miss anything.

An interesting talk I followed yesterday was Marcel Holtzmann’s
presentation about ConnMan, which is a new piece of infrastructure for “getting online”. Marcel went through some parts of the network stack showing many parts that just aren’t up to today’s requirements anymore, and presents a solution that he’s currently working on as part of his work for Intel. ConnMan is a replacement for NetworkManager, which is built to be scalable for the future when new technologies such as WiMax arrive at the user. It’s basically supposed to be a “more than full” replacement for NetworkManager, which is very complicated in its design and often very slow in its use. ConnMan is designed to make it easy to build a UI on top of it, which is good news for people like me, having worked on the NetworkManager plasmoids UI bits. While I was at first rather sceptical, thinking “Now that NetworkManager actually starts to behave like I want it to, it’s being replaced, oh noooooo!”, Marcel’s managed to convince me that the way forward he’s proposing is actually very sensible. Will Stephenson will probably concur as he sees actual documentation, as he’s been the “sucker” who took on the work going through large parts of NetworkManager’s source code to find out how to write a UI for it. Let’s just say “it could’ve been a more pleasant experience” ;-) So yeah, documentation on the interfaces is something critical if you want others to use your stuff.

I had some interesting conversations yesterday with Rasterman, the founder of Enlightenment. Topics ranged from resolution-independant interfaces to release policy, filesystem hierarchies and how that works for users and of course more mundane subjects like “cocktails served in coconuts”.

The atmosphere is is really great, it’s fantastic to discuss plans and their implementations with the iNdT folks (especially when the meeting table is not a table but a large swimming pool — that definitely makes for fun and interesting digressions.

In unrelated news, Gökmen, one of the developers of Pardus Linux (a Turkish Linux distribution) has invited me to speak at a (more user-oriented) conference in Istanbul next month. I’m happily accepting that invitation, so if you’re in Istanbul on April 17 and 18, make sure you drop by.