A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (aka ICSE 2021), in the context of its “Spanish Industry Case Studies” track. We were invited to give a high level overview of the Chromium project and how Igalia contributes to it upstream. This was an unusual chance to speak at a forum other than the usual conferences I attend to, so I welcomed this as a double opportunity to explain the project to people less familiar with Chromium than those attending events such as BlinkOn or the Web Engines Hackfest, as well as to spread some awareness on our work in there. ...

At the end of the last year I wrote a long blog post summarizing the main work I was involved with as part of Igalia’s Chromium team. In it I mentioned that a big chunk of my time was spent working on the migration to the new C++ Mojo types across the entire codebase of Chromium, in the context of the Onion Soup 2.0 project. For those of you who don’t know what Mojo is about, there is extensive information about it in Chromium’s documentation, but for the sake of this post, let’s simplify things and say that Mojo is a modern replacement to Chromium’s legacy IPC APIs which enables a better, simpler and more direct way of communication among all of Chromium’s different processes. ...

Web Browsers and Test Driven Development Working on Web browsers development is not an easy feat but if there's something I'm personally very grateful for when it comes to collaborating with this kind of software projects, it is their testing infrastructure and the peace of mind that it provides me with when making changes on a daily basis. To help you understand the size of these projects, they involve millions of lines of code (Chromium is ~25 million lines of code, followed closely by Firefox and WebKit) and around 200-300 new patches landing everyday. Try to imagine, for one second, how we could make changes if we didn’t have such testing infrastructure. It would basically be utter and complete chao​s and, more especially, it would mean extremely buggy Web browsers, broken implementations of the Web Platform and tens (hundreds?) of new bugs and crashes piling up every day… not a good thing at all for Web browsers, which are these days some of the most widely used applications (and not just ’the thing you use to browse the Web’). ...

It’s the end of December and it seems that yet another year has gone by, so I figured that I’d write an EOY update to summarize my main work at Igalia as part of our Chromium team, as my humble attempt to make up for the lack of posts in this blog during this year. I did quit a few things this year, but for the purpose of this blog post I’ll focus on what I consider the most relevant ones: work on the Servicification and the Blink Onion Soup projects, the migration to the new Mojo APIs and the BrowserInterfaceBroker, as well as a summary of the conferences I attended, both as a regular attendee and a speaker. ...

It's been a few months already since I (re)joined Igalia as part of its Chromium team and I couldn't be happier about it: right since the very first day, I felt perfectly integrated as part of the team that I'd be part of and quickly started making my way through the -fully upstream- project that would keep me busy during the following months: the Chromium Servicification Project. But what is this "Chromium servicification project"? Well, according to the Wiktionary the word "servicification" means, applied to computing, "the migration from monolithic legacy applications to service-based components and solutions", which is exactly what this project is about: as described in the Chromium servicification project's website, the whole purpose behind this idea is "to migrate the code base to a more modular, service-oriented architecture", in order to "produce reusable and decoupled components while also reducing duplication". ...

It’s almost one year later and, despite the acquisition by SmugMug a few months ago and the predictions from some people that it would mean me stopping from using Flickr & maintaining Frogr, here comes the new release of frogr 1.5. Not many changes this time, but some of them hopefully still useful for some people, such as the empty initial state that is now shown when you don’t have any pictures, as requested a while ago already by Nick Richards (thanks Nick!), or the removal of the applications menu from the shell’s top panel (now integrated in the hamburger menu), in line with the “App Menu Retirement” initiative. ...

Winds of Change. One of my favourite songs ever and one that comes to my mind now that me and my family are going through quite some important changes, once again. But let’s start from the beginning… A few years ago, back in January 2013, my family and me moved to the UK as the result of my decision to leave Igalia after almost 7 years in the company to embark ourselves in the “adventure” or living abroad. This was an idea we had been thinking about for a while already at that time, and our current situation back then suggested that it could be the right moment to try it out… so we did. ...

It’s been a pretty hectic time during the past months for me here at Endless, busy with updating our desktop to the latest stable version of GNOME Shell (3.26, at the time the process started), among other things. And in all this excitement, it seems like I forgot to blog so I think this time I’ll keep it short for once, and simply link to a video I made a couple of months ago, right when I was about to finish the first phase of the process (which ended up taking a bit longer than expected). ...

Another year goes by and, again, I feel the call to make one more release just before 2017 over, so here we are: frogr 1.4 is out! Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Who uses Flickr in 2017 anyway?". Well, as shocking as this might seem to you, it is apparently not just me who is using this small app, but also another 8,935 users out there issuing an average of 0.22 Queries Per Second every day (19008 queries a day) for the past year, according to the stats provided by Flickr for the API key. ...

After spending a few days in Manchester with other fellow GNOME hackers and colleagues from Endless, I’m finally back at my place in the sunny land of Surrey (England) and I thought it would be nice to write some sort of recap, so here it is: The Conference I arrived in Manchester on Thursday the 27th just on time to go to the pre-registration event where I met the rest of the gang and had some dinner, and that was already a great start. Let's forget about the fact that I lost my badge even before leaving the place, which has to be some type of record (losing the badge before the conference starts, really?), but all in all it was great to meet old friends, as well as some new faces, that evening already. Then the 3 core days of GUADEC started. My first impression was that everything (including the accommodation at the university, which was awesome) was very well organized in general, and the venue make it for a perfect place to organize this type of event, so I was already impressed even before things started. ...

We just released Endless OS 3.2 to the world after a lot of really hard work from everyone here at Endless, including many important changes and fixes that spread pretty much across the whole OS: from the guts and less visible parts of the core system (e.g. a newer Linux kernel, OSTree and Flatpak improvements, updated libraries…) to other more visible parts including a whole rebase of the GNOME components and applications (e.g. mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, nautilus…), newer and improved “Endless apps” and a completely revamped desktop environment. ...

Quick post to let you know that I just released frogr 1.3. This is mostly a small update to incorporate a bunch of updates in translations, a few changes aimed at improving the flatpak version of it (the desktop icon has been broken for a while until a few weeks ago) and to remove some deprecated calls in recent versions of GTK+. Ah! I’ve also officially dropped support for OS X via gtk-osx, as I was systematically failing to update and use (I only use frogr from GNOME these days) since a loooong time ago, and so it did not make sense for me to keep pretending that the mac version is something that is usable and maintained anymore. ...

It’s been two years since the last time I went to FOSDEM, but it seems that this year I’m going to be there again and, after having traveled to Brussels a few times already by plane and train, this year I’m going by car!: from home to the Euro tunnel and then all the way up to Brussels. Let’s see how it goes. As for the conference, I don’t have any particular plan other than going to some keynotes and probably spending most of my time in the Distributions and the Desktops devrooms. Well, and of course joining other GNOME people at A La Bécasse, on Saturday night. ...

Of course, just a few hours after releasing frogr 1.1, I’ve noticed that there was actually no good reason to depend on gettext 0.19.8 for the purposes of removing the intltool dependency only, since 0.19.7 would be enough. So, as raising that requirement up to 0.19.8 was causing trouble to package frogr for some distros still in 0.19.7 (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), I’ve decided to do a quick new release and frogr 1.2 is now out with that only change. ...

After almost one year, I’ve finally released another small iteration of frogr with a few updates and improvements. Not many things, to be honest, bust just a few as I said: Added support for flatpak: it's now possible to authenticate frogr from inside the sandbox, as well as open pictures/videos in the appropriate viewer, thanks to the OpenURI portal. Updated translations: as it was noted in the past when I released 1.0, several translations were left out incomplete back then. Hopefully the new version will be much better in that regard. Dropped the build dependency on intltool (requires gettext >= 0.19.8). A few bugfixes too and other maintenance tasks, as usual. Besides, another significant difference compared to previous releases is related to the way I'm distributing it: in the past, if you used Ubuntu, you could configure my PPA and install it from there even in fairly old versions of the distro. However, this time that's only possible if you have Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak", as that's the one that ships gettext >= 0.19.8, which is required now that I removed all trace of intltool (more info in this post). However, this is also the first time I’m using flatpak to distribute frogr so, regardless of which distribution you have, you can now install and run it as long as you have the org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.22 stable runtime installed locally. Not too bad! :-). See more detailed instructions in its web site. ...

I haven’t blogged in a while -mostly due to lack of time, as usual- but I thought I’d write something today to let the world know about one of the things I’ve worked on a bit during this week, while remotely attending the Web Engines Hackfest from home: Setting up an environment for cross-compiling WebKit2GTK+ for ARM I know this is not new, nor ground-breaking news, but the truth is that I could not find any up-to-date documentation on the topic in a any public forum (the only one I found was this pretty old post from the time WebKitGTK+ used autotools), so I thought I would devote some time to it now, so that I could save more in the future. Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org, ...

Last week I had the chance to attend for 3 days the GNOME Software Hackfest, organized by Richard Hughes and hosted at the brand new Red Hat’s London office. And besides meeting new people and some old friends (which I admit to be one of my favourite aspects about attending these kind of events), and discovering what it’s now my new favourite place for fast-food near London bridge, I happened to learn quite a few new things while working on my particular personal quest: getting Chromium browser to run as an xdg-app. ...

I’ve just released frogr 1.0. I can’t believe it took me 6 years to move from the 0.x series to the 1.0 release, but here it is finally. For good or bad. This release is again a small increment on top of the previous one that fixes a few bugs, should make the UI look a bit more consistent and “modern”, and includes some cleanups at the code level that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, like using G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE, which helped me get rid of ~1.7K LoC. ...

It’s certainly been a while since I attended this event for the last time, 2 years ago, when it was a WebKitGTK+ only oriented hackfest, so I guess it was a matter of time it happened again… It will be different for me this time, though, as now my main focus won’t be on accessibility (yet I’m happy to help with that, too), but on fixing a few issues related to the WebKit2GTK+ API layer that I found while working on our platform (Endless OS), mostly related to its implementation of accelerated compositing. ...