The Open Sourcerer

Year MMXVI in 1 ½ minute2 min read

—

by

Jeff
in , ,

This is part 2 of my seven-years retrospective. It is again kept extremely short and high-level.

Capacitor plague on my dad's motherboard
  • I took down my online personal Interaction Design portfolio back then, leaving just a summary page.
  • I completed my 2nd term on the board of the GNOME Foundation, and wrote a report summarizing my duties that year.
    At the end of these two terms, I decided to leave the GNOME Foundation board, as I felt like I had accomplished what I had to accomplish, and because I wanted to get back some balance in my personal life, as well as the ability to focus on my other non-profit work and professional duties.
  • I had found a rare business mentor, André, a friend of the family, who had had a very interesting entrepreneurial career and who kindly accepted to help… then I learned a few months later that he suddenly died of a heart attack.
  • Attended GUADEC in Karlsruhe, where some impressive tunnelworks were going on, and was happy to meet up with the Pitivi team and GSoC students there! Took some photos, including the fact that it was probably the only conference with an inflateable kiddie pool to watercool hackers (shout out to Bilboed “brainstorming with his eyes closed” in the right-hand side of that picture).
  • Sometime later, I began working with a certain Linux-and-security-oriented laptop manufacturer as their chief marketing officer, a contractor assignment that lasted for nearly 3 years.
  • I enthusiastically flirted with elementary OS‘ “Pantheon” desktop on Fedora, because GNOME Shell’s main performance slowdown issue at the time was irking me too much—so much so that I said I’d buy a Ferrari to whoever would prove me wrong (nobody did so far, but don’t attempt this in 2022, that offer is no longer valid; the performance problems were solved in 2019 and beyond). Pantheon on Fedora was an interesting experiment, although integration was lacking as it was never meant to be run outside of elementary and, understandbly, came with zero support for that usecase.
  • That year, Michael Catanzaro discovered, to his great shock, that I existed even in 2006.
  • Discovered that random freezes on an old Linux computer can simply be due to capacitor plague (pictured above). Replacing these three capacitors on my father’s computer motherboard eliminated the random freezes.
  • Organised the 2016 GNOME Summit in Montréal. Discovered the hard way that you can’t relocate the GNOME Summit out of the Boston area (or USA), even as an official event by the Foundation, without having a very different set of attendees as a result. People back then didn’t so desperately want to cross the border to the North.
Jeff
Latest posts by Jeff (see all)