A short report of BeGeistert 029

BeGeistert 029 was once more a quite small gathering, with 14 Haiku users attending, plus one father, girlfriend, wife and baby. Puck was there the second year in a row, bringing Colin’s desktop machine with him, which was left behind when Colin moved to New Zealand. (How is Colin these days?) Another new face to BeGeistert: Markus “TwoFX”, one of our finalists in the Google Code-In 2014 and contributer of various patches since. He brought his girlfriend Leslie, who pleasantly doubled the number of attending females.

I arrived later than usual on Saturday, but with perfect timing for lunch - I’m gifted that way - and so, after the meal, BeGeistert was already in full swing. People discussing their latest ideas, chatting, or in my case keeping Axel away from real work by having him show me how to split some massive commit into more easily to handle smaller ones. Also, my iprowifi4965 refused to connect to the WPA encrypted BeGeistert WLAN, as did Adrien’s machine, so we used good old tethered LAN…

We had three talks planned for this BeGeistert, but our timetable was thwarted by the lack of a projector (which Germans wrongly call “Beamer”, as Jonathan reminded us :)). Maybe one would be available in the evening, but after our dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the Altstadt and a traditional round of “Killepitsch” (a herbal liquor), nobody was really in the mood. So the talks were postponed to Sunday. Which has its own problems, because as people stay up late into the night, they tend to sleep in.

When finally everyone was groomed, fed and present on Sunday, it was 11am when we had our first talk of the day: Julian presented his work on the app_server. It was the most in-depth and well prepared of the talks this day. There are slides of his talk “Improve app_server for WebKit” which I recommend to view alongside the video.

Then lunch.

The second talk was Axel’s introduction to the launch_daemon. For the video I used Daat’s footage, because there are no slides and with its higher resolution, you can see what’s going on on the screen. There are problems with it too, however. The beginning seconds are audio only, as well as a bit in the middle, where Daat had to change batteries (good to have a separate audio recording). Also, Axel stands in the way a bit sometimes and it’s all a bit dark… :). For more info, see also the wiki topic on the launch_daemon.

A little break. Coffee.

Last but not least, our final talk by François on porting stuff to Haiku, see the video and his massive slides. Took him 40 minutes to list all the stuff he started, finished or plans to port in the past 10 years… “Too many ports”. :)

I have uploaded the few crappy photos I took. I know Zoltan took a few as well, as did Jérôme and Daniel, of course. Maybe they’ll provide a link to theirs in the comments? The same goes for possible other reports.

So… that was more or less it for the BeGeistert week-end. The following week, Adrien and Julian continued with the CodeSprint, with François, Jonathan and Olivier staying the Monday and Jérôme with Michaela and tiny Alexis leaving on Wednesday. Axel and Rene took off work for the week to participate from home, which is awesome! There’ll be another report by all the code sprinters, detailing who did what, how and why after they’ve crossed the finish line and caught their breath a bit.

As usual for the past few years, BeGeistert has run on a loss. Together with the CodeSprint it takes about 35 attendees to break even; we were only 14. Many thanks to Haiku Inc. for once again stepping into the breach! Of course it would be much better if more people came to BeGeistert… Also, thanks to Andrew Hudson, who has donated generously once more to the beverages for our code sprinters!

See you all again next year in Düsseldorf!