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).
Tuesday is going to be adventure-packed. Let’s hope everyone slept well. I made a quick survey but I’m not sure everyone answered honestly. Although someone admitted lying on the bed and waking up with the clothes still on. No, I won’t give names :D
We had to choose between a Segway tour or a visit to the Exploratorium.
[Looks like I’m still jet-lagged a week later… I’ll try to publish my notes anyway, and put photos later on]
Today is the big day: we’re going to the Googleplex in Mountain View!
It took a while to get there due to traffic jam, and we were on the lucky bus, the other ones took even more time. Before getting out we had a tour of the vast campus with the bus, showing the various buildings and places, and the famous gbikes everywhere.
So this is the day.
I slept not too bad. The only trouble with rooms this big is you have to walk a lot :D
After two days hacking I wanted to do some sightseeing. I started by the cable-car, it’s really funny the way it goes up and down. Then I went north on Van Ness, west on Lombard street, and I walked a little in the Presidio Park. Was nice to see some nature! And I finally saw the Golden-Gate Bridge in the distance. Then I walked back to town via the Palace of Fine Arts, Marina Boulevard (btw, boulevard is a French word, although there are several explanations for its origin), Fort Mason, and they I took the bus back to the hotel to get a shower and a little nap before the GCI Opening Party.
Saturday, also slept very well, I’m thinking about taking the mattress with me but it won’t fit into the plane. and yet I woke up early to participate in a French radio show remotely, that is broadcasted live from the Very Important Party (a little DemoParty I usually attend), for them it’s 5pm, but for me it’s 8am…
At 10 I’m packing up as I’ll have to change the hotel, I just hope I’ll sleep as well in the next one. It’s much more expensive but that doesn’t always scale linearly with the sleep levels!
Friday, I sleep surprisingly well for a first night abroad. I chose to wear a red FSFE t-shirt “There is NO CLOUD, just some other people’s computers”.
At 10am I’m going out to get a donut and coffee, and try to get inside NoiseBridge. Ringing the bell didn’t really work the first time, so I had to work a bit and retry once or twice. But then I was greeted by a French guy, who gave me a tour of the space : library, soldering stations, lots of parts, two classroom, a sewing space, and soon a large cutting machine… they have the whole 3rd floor of the building!
There weren’t many occupants as most hackers were at the Toorcamp for the week. But gradually more people came in, either hackers with their own RFID pass, or visitors ringing the bell. After some time, we noticed there were more French-speaking people than natives :D
So, it’s Thursday and I’m getting a plane to San Francisco for the GCI meeting. Well, hopefully, as the French railway is on strike… Ok, my train was canceled, but another was 1.5 hours late so I managed to jump on it and arrive… at the Paris Lyon station, which meant taking the RER (oh no, it’s on strike as well), ok, the Metro to another station and then the RER to the airport.
Finally a new report. The time since the latest report has been spent mostly into gaining a preliminary support to streaming and begin finalyzing the underlying support code.
This included documenting myself about the APIs and figuring out how to implement the functionality in a clean way. There are various additions, we are moving to the right place so we finally have a streaming infrastructure.
Hi there! Once again with about a month of delay, here comes the activity report.
This report covers the range hrev50117-hrev50336.
Command line apps
AGMS contributed some fixes to the "mail" command line app which can be now be used easily to send automated messages from a script. This is an useful tool to have in automated tasks to post status report, errors, etc.
Opening issues for an application at github, for example, is a good way to help improving software. Often it's only a small detail and something a non-programming user could easily fix. Maybe it's just a typo or improved documentation etc.
Doing the changes yourself and contributing these fixes directly via a so-called "pull-request" is even better, as it saves the precious time of the developers/maintainers. Also, this dabbling in code might be a nice way to slowly ease yourself into more ambitious contributions.
