We’re Going to WestCoast Summit!

At the end of June, we’ll be meeting up with GNOME developers from the United States to discuss our future plans and how we can collaborate. It’s a wonderful opportunity to meet other players from the open source world in California’s famous Silicon Valley.

This year, four core elementary members will be making the trip out to San Francisco: Avi Romanoff, one of our original desktop developers, enthusiastic public speaker, and backend web developer; Cassidy James, UX designer and frontend web developer; Cody Garver (AKA the man behind the curtain), OS developer, packager, scripter, organizer, and more; and finally Daniel Foré, founder, UX designer, and visual designer.

Last year, most of our discussion with GNOME revolved around bringing Granite features into Gtk. We’re very proud to say that as of now, we’ve been able to deprecate the majority of Granite’s special widgets due to improvements in GTK+. We’d like to continue this trend and identify more opportunities to work together with GNOME and make our work available to as many people as possible.

The GNOME developers have a loose agenda for the hackfest including application sandboxing, shell performance, and application development (GNOME Builder). In addition, we plan to bring up orchestrating efforts to improve battery life, AppStream and how it fits into our plans for AppCenter, better HiDPI support (specifically with regards to icon sizing), and potentially collaborating on an OS installer.

As a bonus, the four of us will be meeting up before the summit for a quick sprint to take advantage of the face time. We’re working on something we think is going to be really big and we’re excited to share more details after the summit.

While we have a list of things we want to discuss, we’re always welcome to suggestions! If there’s something you’d like to see us bring up with the folks at GNOME, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments. Whether it’s about a feature in Mutter or GTK+, or just something in a GNOME app, it’s a great opportunity to have a discussion.

Lastly, we are able to send four core members out to the summit because of the awesome support we’ve been getting from our users and fans. Plane tickets and a hotel room are expensive, but are completely worth it when we get dedicated face-to-face time with each other and GNOME developers. If you’d like to make sure we can continue these successful meetups, you can always get involved with funding. Every dollar helps :)