05 Oct 2018
X.Org Developer’s Conference (XDC) is the summit meeting for people that work with graphics in all the world to meet each other for three days. There you will find people working with compositors, direct rendering management (DRM), graphics applications, and so forth; all these people at the same place create a unique learning opportunity. Finally, you can feel the community spirit in every table, talk, and corner.
The XDC has many exciting talks, social events, and space for discussion with developers. All of this enabled thanks to the organization team, which did a great job by organizing the conference; they selected a great university that had a perfect structure for hosting the event. They also included social events that introduced some background about the history of the La Coruna; In my case, I enjoyed to learn a bit of the local history. About the food, the conference provided coffee breaks and lunch during all the days, all of them great!
About the community
In my case, I put as much effort as possible to learn from people. In the first day, I had a great conversation with Daniel Stone, Roman Gilg, Drew DeVault, Guido Günther and other about compositors. In particular, Daniel Stone explained a lot of details about Weston and Wayland; he also taught me how to test Weston on top of VKMS, and how to see logs. Additionally, Daniel gave me an excellent idea: add writeback to VKMS to provide visual output and other features. In the same day, Daniel explained me many things about the community organization and his work to maintain the Gitlab instance for the Freedesktop; I really enjoyed every second of our conversation.
Additionally, I met a group of Sway developers during lunch. After a small chat, for some reason they took their laptops and started to play with Sway; I got really impressed with their work and enthusiasm. Then, I decided that I wanted to learn how to contribute with Sway for two reasons: I want to learn more about graphics in the user space (compositors), and I want to use a new desktop environment. Afterwards, I started asking Drew to teach me how to compile and use Sway. He was really kind, he showed me many things about compositor then pointed me directions to better get into this world.
On the second day, I was obsessed about writeback, and I tried to talk with Brian Starkey; he is the original author of the patch that added writeback to DRM. We spoke for one hour, Bryan explained me so many details about writeback and gave me some ideas on how I could implement it on VKMS. In the end, he also sent me an email with diagrams that he made on-the-fly and some extra explanation about the subject. I am happy that I had the opportunity to learn so many things from him. In the same day, I also got a chance to talk to Arkadiusz Hiler about some of the patches that I sent to IGT, and I also made lots of questions about IGT. He explained with details, how I could read the intel CI report and other related stuff. I hope that after his explanations I can improve my patches and also send much more for IGT.
On the third day, Haneen and I worked together to learn as much as we could by asking many things to Daniel Vetter. We used the opportunity to clarify many of our questions, and also discuss some patches we sent. At the end of our conversation, I applied to become co-mentor in the Outreachy; I hope that I can help bringing new people to become part of this fantastic community.
This is just a brief summary of XDC, I took every single opportunity that I had to talk to people and learned something new.
I finally met Haneen, Daniel Vetter, Sean Paul, Martin Peres, and Arkadiusz Hiler
One exciting thing about working remotely it is the fact that you talk with many people without really know them in person. In particular, I worked with Haneen for such a long time, but I have never seen her; however, in the XDC I finally met her! It was really nice to talk to her, both of us were together most of the time trying to understand as much as we could; as a result, we always helped each other in the event to better understand the concepts that someone would explained us.
I also met Daniel Vetter, and Sean Paul, both of them were our mentors during summer. I really enjoyed to talk with them and put a face on the nickname. Additionally, I met Martin Peres, thanks to him I created this website to keep reporting my work and also thanks to him I could enjoy XDC.
Finally, I met Hiler from Intel. He provided many feedback on the patches I sent IGT; he also helped a lot in the IRC channel. I really liked to meet him in person.
Feedbacks
During the event, Haneen and I received so many feedback on how we could improve the VKMS that we decided to do a workshop in the last day. The workshop was great, a lot of people joined, and we took note of new ideas. From the conversation, we emerged the following list of tasks:
Now that I learned a lot and collected so many feedback, I will work on the following steps:
- Implement writeback support
- Implement configfs system
- Mentor a newcomer in the outreachy
