GCI 2015 meeting; D+3

The last day was spent at the San Francisco office, which although smaller (they have “only” a few floors in a building), is quite nice, with a rooftop and other funny things.

We had a nice breakfast at the cafeteria (I sampled their croissants… not too bad for US ones).

We started with more mentor talks, who weren’t as shy as Stephanie thought.

Then Stephanie gave a little speech about GSoC, which current GCI winner might want to help mentor for the next edition.

We again had a nice buffet for lunch, and were allowed to enjoy the sunny rooftop, with a nice view on the Mozilla office in the next building.

We also had some more talks from googlers. One was about containers and their own solution to it (Kubernetes), as well as machine learning and TensorFlow. We also had someone talking about design, which btw most FLOSS projects fail to address properly. And the last talk was about Project Fi, which aims at providing a seamless WiFi roaming experience over existing hotspots.

After that we had the last batch of, guess what, swag! Including a Cardboard for winnders and mentors (yay, need to find a phone to fit in now!)… and that’s about it. Oh, yeah, and nothing but the latest Pixel-C tablet for the winners (I’m getting jealous now)!

Oh, btw, Stephanie showed us the sec… oh no, sorry, I’m not allowed to tell you ;-)

And finally we had two very nice cakes, along with the chocolate exchange (I forgot to bring some from France, shame on me). At that point I realized they’d probably buy me completely with just some more sugar :D

By then some people already had to leave, the others had some more time for chatting, taking some more photos… then we headed back to the hotel, where most of us left their luggage. Then it was time for goodbye, and saw people going one by one. I sad down with the few remaining geeks, until it was my turn to get to the airport.

There, my plane’s departure got delayed for quite a while. On the way, we had several turbulences, babies crying, and no seat left, so it wasn’t as comfortable as the previous flight. And of course we arrived a bit late, so I missed the train I originally wanted to take, which was the last one from the airport. So I had to go to Paris; but it took me a while to get to the airport train station as there was some unattended luggage and the security locked out the 50m leading to it. I nevertheless managed to get to Paris-Lyon in time for the train I wanted, but it also got delayed… then finally replaced after 1h40.

So, I’m currently writing some of it down in the train, well, I’ll add in some more later as I’m quite tired. I should be arriving soon, time to close the laptop.

I’ll thank again Stephanie and her team, Mary, Ellen, Cat, Josh, Eric, and of course Chris DiBona, and Jeremy Allison and the other googlers, for making it happen so nicely and smoothly. It was really nice to see Hannah and Vale in person, and all other winners, parents and mentors!