Hackfest

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Last weekend I visited my former office to attend the GStreamer hackfest 2015, along with other ~30 hackers from all over the world. This was my very first GStreamer hackfest ever and it was definitely a great experience, although at the beginning I was really not convinced to attend since, after all, why bother attending an event about something I have no clue about? But the answer turned out to be easy in the end, once I actually thought a bit about it: it would be a good opportunity both to learn more about the project and to meet people in real life (old friends included), making the most of it happening 15min away from my house. So, I went there. ...

As many other WebKitGTK+ hackers (30 in total), I flew last Saturday to A Coruña to attend the 5th edition of the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, hosted once again by Igalia at their premises and where people from several different affiliations gathered together to try to give our beloved port a boost. As for me, I flew there to work mainly on accessibility related issues, making the most of the fact that both Joanie (Orca maintainer) and Piñeiro (ATK maintainer) would be there too, so it should be possible to make things happen faster, specially discussion-wise. ...

It seems this year GUADEC is going to be pretty close to my place and so I will surely attend, but this time I won’t go by plane but by bike, which since some months ago has become my main vehicle for moving around the beautiful city where I live in: A Coruña. Also, besides hanging around the venue and trying to help as much as possible as the local I am, I’ll be talking about WebKitGTK+ in the afternoon on Thursday 26th, so feel free to come round the room if you feel curious about the current status of the whole thing and the current plans for the short and medium term, which are mostly focused around WebKit2 and the roadmap we’re already following. ...

As Piñeiro already mentioned in some posts, last week a bunch of hackers attended the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest 2012 here at the Igalia offices, in the lovely city of Coruña. As the guy working on accessibility support for WebKitGTK+, I attended the hackfest to join some other great people representing different projects, such as Mozilla, Orca, AT-SPI, ATK, GTK+ and Qt. So, apart from helping with some “local” organizational details of the hackfest and taking some pictures, I spent some time hacking in WebKitGTK+’s accessibility code and participating in some discussions. ...

Some posts have been already published about this during the last days, but just in case you missed them I will mention it here again: Last week, a bunch of hackers gathered together in the Igalia office in Coruña for the third edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest , and a lot of work has been done, as Juanjo has already summarized in his “WebKitGTK+ hackfest wrap up” post. ...

Last week some of the members of the Igalia WebKit team, attended to the second edition of the WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino, California, in order to gather round with other WebKit contributors to discuss and work around our favorite web engine, away from IRC and with a more personal and “human” touch. As for me, it was the first time I attended this unconference and I have to say it was a great experience overall, even if accessibility (the field I usually work on through the GTK port of WebKit) was not precisely a hot topic there. But in the other hand, I managed to put some faces to people I just knew from IRC, attended to several interesting discussions and sessions, did some actual work (tm) and met Chris Fleizach, the guy from Apple involved in accessibility for the Mac port, who attended the meeting on Tuesday morning and discussed with me some interesting topics, mainly about the implementation of the accessibility support in the Mac port of WebKit2. ...

After the daily reports written by Diego in his blog, few more things can be told about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest hosted at the Igalia offices last week, but I’d like to comment anyway some impressions from my personal point of view, if you don’t mind reading them. First of all, this was the second time I attended to this hackfest (I “kind of” attended last year hackfest as well) but now things were pretty different for me, basically because one year ago I was not part of the Igalia WebKit team yet, hence my contributions in the hackfest were pretty small (see my post back then for more details). However, this time I attended full-time to the event and I must say I’m really proud of the work I’ve been doing right there, which I hope will eventually lead to the resolution of this WebKit metabug, which was about fixing bugs blocking ORCA support from WebKitGTK based applications. ...