This year’s GNOME Conference was pretty much fantastic. I had a great time in Istanbul. Where to start?

• The People: All the awesome folks were there, had great discussions and learned a bunch of new things.
• The Event: Pretty good, presentations mostly technical, BoFs I attended were more or less fruitful, visionary talks did have plans with them, some flames.
• The Partaes: Hotel open terraces rock. Boat triped rocked (thanks Collabora!). Lots of fun! (except the one with cheap beer..)
• The City: Fantastic. Istanbul and the Bosporus are beutiful, pretty European feeling, its people were very friendly, weather was fine.

I took a bunch of photos from the event and the City — check them out at dimitris.glezos.com/photos/events/guadec08/.

I gave a short talk on Transifex. Two points I wanted to stress were the following. One, translations are important for any project that would like to increase its userbase with little sweat (you code for English and let translators help you reach out to a bigger audience). You create for the 5% of the Earth’s population, plus the other 95%. And two, that GNOME’s concerns for the upcoming move to distribute VCSs and translations could become less of a problem once we deploy Transifex in GNOME’s infrastructure.

From the discussions I had, it seems that a lot of people are anxious in setting Transifex somewhere centrally for any open source project, hosted anywhere, to benefit from. There are some maintainers who stick around svn.gnome.org, just for the sake of translations. That’s something that shouldn’t happen — developers shouldn’t be forced by translations to use inferior tools that affect their productivity negatively. Hackers tend to get frustrated quite easily when they don’t have the tools they need. :-/