• Istanbul looks great. Many cats. Helpful people. Lots of beatiful things everywhere. And I went to Asia for the first time in my life yesterday evening. Sure, it was only the asian side of Istanbul, but still, big event!

• Quite easy to spot GUADEC people when you walk around. And hard to eat somewhere and not find some of them :-)

• Lucas really is my evil twin. Proof: those two posts that also summarize my first two days. Lots of discussion with him. Hard to not fall in love with him ;-)

• Doctor Don is here. And it seems he's talking about pulse to lots of people because Shaun promised him eternal glory.

• Had a BoF about release notes. Hopefully, this has helped make people aware of the various issues we have when writing release notes. Important thing that most people seem to not know: the most consuming part of the release notes is doing research about what to put in there, not writing -- so no need to be a good writer to help! Oh, and if you're here in Istanbul, you should really go and talk to Davyd or Murray to get them excited about new 2.24 material that they should put in the release notes.

• Andreas still loves to tell this story about his ancestors, the woodmen. Explains a lot of things.

• Also had a talk/BoF about translation tools. I think we really have a good plan, and Dimtiris is so great. Good to see my beloved Danilo again and glad to see his positive feelings about all this.

• Couldn't attend many sessions so far because of meetings. That's a bit sad, but on the other hand, everything went well and there are some exciting stuff.

• I'm Silvia again this year. Still no progress in catalan.

• I also have two nametags, so I'm ready in case somebody starts stealing all nametags.

• Couldn't play the FreeFA tournament, but I heard Bastien lost. Don't know if I can go and ask him to check it's true :-)

• No Love/Hate wall yet? Any volunteer to set this up?

I've been in Mont de Marsan in the last few days for the RMLL (which is actually named LSM in english). This is the biggest community event in France, so it's quite a good place to be! On the bad side, we could have done with a more helpful weather and a better connectivity to the outside world in the boothes area, but it was still an enjoyable event in the end.

While I was the only openSUSE advocate, I was pleased to see french GNOME friends Claude (okay, he's swiss), Frédéric (hrm, he's belgian...) and Dave (err... irish?!?). I guess that's the best example to show that the french-speaking community is far from being a french-only one :-) Yay for francophonie! Of course, there were also most of the usual suspects who usually attend the major french/french-speaking events, so it's always a good time to mix with people from many different projects or organizations. Which explains how I could talk to many people. I got good feedback about GNOME and I think I got quite a fewpeople interested in openSUSE: two simple things to make me happy :-)

There was the usual GNOME booth where I tried to help a bit (only a bit :-)), but I also attended to give three talks (an organizer told me this might be a new record!):

• the first one was about the openSUSE community, and howthe community is growing and how the development process is beeing opened. Unfortunately, the attendance turned out to be low :/ Not really sure why, but it's probably (at least partly) because we started late and it was after a talk from a totally unrelated topic (so people didn't stay). It sill went well, I guess.
• I also talked about the openSUSE build service. There was a track about build forges and infrastructure, and it seemed natural to talk about the build service there. While I'm far from being an expert, I think I still managed to introduce it in an understandable way ;-) We had some great discussion with a few people about upstream, packaging, making some steps easier, etc. I was glad because it was really the right place for this talk.
• and finally, I gave an overview of the release engineering processes in GNOME. Since I've been involved in this area for quite some time, it all seems natural to me, but it's true that people usually don't know what it involves. I simplified a bit some stuff, but I tried to explain our development processes, how the development cycle is organized, how a tarball is rolled and how a complete GNOME release is made available. There are so many things to tell about all this... Good stuff!

I'll put the slides online soonish -- just need to fix one or two typos. However, I guess the slides are nearly useless if you only look at them since I've been using the "one word or very short sentence per slide" rule. I really like to do talks this way, although it's not always possible (really much harder for technical topics, for example). But it really gives me the feeling that it's more inspiring for people who attend the talk. And while you could think it's way easier and faster to write slides like this, it's not always the case (I also love doing photos-only slides, but it requires even more time).

Oh, and Claude had this wonderful initiative. People liked this and had fun trying to build this penguin the right way.

Next steps: a night in Lyon with some friends, before heading to Istanbul for GUADEC for some great time with lots of GNOME people: