Aarhus Tak care of LibreOffice

Once a year the LibreOffice community gathered for few days.

It’s really a great occasion for in person meeting. People came from all over the world, from every continent to share experiences, knowledges, passion and much more. This is also a special window of time where you can mix in the same room developers, translators, promoters, trainers, users, being volonteers or professionnels.

I did attend the conference this year, and the program was not what I can call ‘light’. During three days, there were talks from 9am to 6:30pm. Presentations covered :

• migration of companies and administrations,
• promotion in school, and business (marketing)
• localisation of the project and exchange on animating local events around LibreOffice
• quality assuance through tools and process
• and lots of developements slots.

Being myself a developer, I mostly attend the last track.

I was really impress by the focus put on code quality. The great team tracks every regressions in the tools by loading  at least once a week more than 80000 documents, whose are exported to many files format. They build fuzzing tests to produce every kind of documents content, even non-human imaginable ones.

Take a look at devcentral, you will find there other interesting tools.

Talks apart, there’s plenty of time during lunchs and nights to chat with one another. These are so rare opportunity to exchange culture and way of life, and discover country with the point of view of their inhabitants. I learn how sad it was when Big Tex burned some years ago, how agile coding was applied in Vietnam and the danish method to enjoy having a drink in terrass when it’s cold : use blanket and warming table.

On the way back home, my last plane was cancelled and have to wait three more hours in Munich. Sadly, I didn’t take this opportunity to ‘meet’ OktoberFest which was taking place at that time. After reading so much news mentionning this event on Phoronix, too bad.

To conclude the journey, I shared the last plane with another french guy who – actually did go to OktoberFest during his stop at the airport and – is a fellow LibreOffice user enjoying it every days at work to get his job done.

Back to work, I gave a presentation to the Java dev team, describing what I suppose was the most interesting for them. Working in insurance which send so many mails each passing year, we relying on different tools for mailmerging. We’re deploying as much tools as we can as web application, and we’re expecting lot’s of simplification pluging our own CRM to LibreOffice Online for mail customisation.

Keep up the good job everybody, and beware of the file’s formats you choose when producing documents 🙂

Publicité

Back from Toulouse

Past weekend, I’ve attented LibreOffice Hackfest Toulouse.

As Kohei wrote some days ago about Seattle’s one, I didn’t know really what to expect.

This hackfest took place inside a bigger event : Capitole du libre. It’s a community oriented event that you can compare in some way to fosdem. There were many booth from independents projects (Mozilla, OpenStreetMap, Kde, Haiku, OpenSuse, …) and lot’s of presentations covering freedom and free software during Saturday. On Sunday most of the rooms host training and visitors can get advices. Another hackfest (akademy-fr around kde) was held during the weekend, but I didn’t visit them.

We were mostly 5 developers attending the hackfest, and while not coding we enjoyed talking with visitors on accessibility (mostly blind people), documentation, open bugs. Some of them where teachers facing political decisions : in France, during secondary schools depending where you’re living, kids could have netbook, casual laptop (with Ubuntu or Windows) or tablet (Android or iOS). And of course this could change : politicians like announcement, especially before being elected. So teachers simply have to adapt their tooling over time. Michael took the opportunity to propose CloudOn solution for iPad. Most of the visitors where supportive of document ownership, and just try to cope with the administrative situation.

On a coding side, Bjoern fought again bookmarks, Markus and Michael improved OpenGL rendering, Arnaud while not running in the stairway, reserving lunch, looking for keys, sweets or whatever, improved Basic code. On my side, I’ve was easyhacking the code.

Thanks for every one for sharing cpu cycles through icecream, your valuable advices and more specificly Arnaud for organizing the event, and thanking all of us for coming 😉

un → fr

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