san francisco, may 2012

I recently attended the Tizen Conference. I thought it might be good to write up a little about that visit (belated though it is, because I wrote half of this up, and then forgot).

I arrived on Saturday 5th, a little early, which gave me some time to recover from the flight (and the massive, massive queue through SFO immigration control - I think Carsten and I were waiting there some 1.5-2 hours). Once through, though, we met up with Thiago, and it was a swift, and generally pleasant trip on the BART to the Hyatt Regency, where the ghosts of MeeGo past were certainly felt by me at least. The rest of the day wasn't all that memorable for me, as I was quite tired.

Sunday was also mostly non-eventful, thanks to being really really tired, although we had a very nice (and amusing) breakfast in the Hyatt with Ash and others. Then spent a while wandering around with Ash and Carsten while waiting for an old friend from IRC to turn up, and picked up a new laptop for Kamilla.

I spent most of Monday touring around San Francisco and tinkering with cable cars with David and Denise. I even managed to stumble across the San Francisco Sjømannskirken by accident, which was a nice touch. We had a nice lunch in Chinatown, after wandering around looking for places offering decent food for a while. We stumbled back to the Hyatt later that afternoon, got ourselves registered for the conference, and started talking to folks, which continued on for quite some time. I even stumbled across Rob from Collabora, even though neither of us knew the other was coming, which was a pleasant surprise.

The evening concluded with a keynote from Jim Zemlin. I've spoken with Jim in person a bit before, and had the pleasure of appearing on stage with him at last year's MeeGo Conference keynote, but I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the content of his speech, which didn't really seem to offer too much real content relevant to Tizen, but I heard later on that he had to parachute in at the last minute due to scheduling conflicts with some of the other planned content for the keynote, which would certainly explain that.

The following morning, I stumbled down, chatted to various people, and wandered in for the keynotes, which thankfully were of a much better quality. I especially enjoyed the presentation by Imad and JD, from Intel OTC and Samsung respectively. They quite clearly care a lot about their work, and managed to fit a few demos in too, which was great to avoid that "vaporware" taint that (at least for me) MeeGo had, until Nokia actually shipped a product after killing the ecosystem off.

Some discussion about Tizen governance also happened through some more introduction about the Tizen Association. I'm still not sure precisely how they fit in with Tizen as an open source project, something which I expect will become clearer over time, along with whether or not Tizen will be meritocratically governed or not.

I'll wrap up, for now, as I'm getting quite long - but suffice to say, after the keynotes, I went to loads of great sessions, met & talked with lots of interesting folks - some old friends, made some new ones - and in general had a great time. I'm keeping one eye on Tizen to see what develops. Especially as it already runs Qt.

on conferences, part #2

Also late, but at least it's only a few weeks late, I also attended the first Qt Contributors summit, in Berlin in June. Berlin seemed like a fairly typical european city , at least to me, although my experience admittedly isn't that broad yet. I had a few problems with some unfriendly locals making my trip a little more hasslesome than it would perhaps have been otherwise, but all in all, I quite enjoyed it. I don't think my friend John did, though, as he lost his luggage. :)

Meeting so many Qt folks was great, the content of the discussions was intriguing, and I'm sure that some solid work has been laid for the future. I know that I got quite a few ideas for my current pet project, poking at the guts of QFileSystemWatcher to make it much more useful, and hopefully less resource intensive (in most situations) by means of not using a thread internally for no good reason. But that's material for another day.

on conferences

Just a short post, as I'm by now fashionably late for this.

I attended MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in May, my greatest thanks to my excellent employer, Collabora Ltd for sponsoring my trip. It was a pretty intense week for a lot of reasons, one of which being that the week before my visit, I was asked to demonstrate some software I have been working on, a sort of mesh synchronised object store.

I showed off a simple contacts application synchronising contacts across three devices, but my real plans for that are a lot more - but that is content for another post, perhaps, another day. I think the show went pretty well, certainly, the reception of some parts of the keynote was a bit mixed.

It was also the first time I have visited the US before, and it was certainly a different experience to practically anywhere I have been before. San Francisco was an interesting place in particular to visit, with extreme contrast (people living on the streets with obvious mental issues, while there are villas in the background etc.) and typical cultural differences, some of which I found quite strange, like mandatory tipping. All in all, I think I'd visit again, though.

The conference itself was quite excellent, lots of interesting talks going on, and as usual, meeting all the familiar faces - and making new friends - was fantastic. I only wish I had been less frantically busy and jetlagged (or tired after being busy) to make more of the experiences. By the time I had recovered from everything, the conference was almost over. Though thankfully, I spent an extra two days wandering the streets of the city seeing some sights.