UbuCon Europe – a sure sign of community strength

UbuCon Europe, 18-20 Nov 2016, Essen, Germany

Recovering from a great UbuCon Europe session that just took place a couple weeks ago! This year was attended by 170 people from 20 countries, about half coming from Germany. Almost everyone was (obviously) running Ubuntu and had been around in the community for years.

The event was organised by the Ubuntu community, led by Sujeevan Vijayakumaran – congrats to him! The venue, the schedule, the social events and sponsoring were all flawlessly executed and it showed the level of commitment the European Ubuntu community has. So much so that the community are already looking forward to the next big UbuCon in Paris!

The venue was the Unperfekthaus, central to Essen. A beautifully weird and inclusive 4-storey coworking / artist’s / maker-space / café / event location.

Selection of talks
We had a good Canonical attendance at the event that included Jane, Thibaut, Thomas, Alan, Christian, Daniel, Martin and Michael! Many long-standing community members such as Laura Fautley (czajkowski), Elizabeth Joseph Krumbach (pleia2), cm-t arudy, José Antonio Rey, Marcos Costales, Marius Gripsgård (mariogrip), Philip Ballew and Nathan Haines also attended and presented to – all worthy of a mention.

Jane gave a keynote at the event to a packed room. The talks and workshop from Alan, Daniel, Michael and Thibaut were focused on snaps and IoT and were well-received. There seemed to be a lot of interest in learning more about the new way of doing things and getting started immediately – what we like to hear.

Malte Lantin from Microsoft gave an overview of Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. The talk started by covering why Microsoft worked on the project, some history of previous attempts at nix compatibility and posix compliance along with some technical infrastructure details. A few demos were given and technical questions from the audience answered.

Elizabeth K Joseph gave a talk reminding the audience that while the Ubuntu project has been branching out to new technology, the traditional desktop is still there, and still needs volunteers to help. She outlined a great selection of ways in which new contributors can get involved with practical advice and links to resources all the way through.

Alan gave a talk on “zero to store” about snaps and the store. The examples were well picked and lots of fun – the feedback after the session was mostly amazement of how easy it has become to build and publish software. Michael’s session “digging deep into snapcraft” which was in the following time-slot was very well-attended. Probably as a result.

On the snap workshop, everyone worked through the codelabs examples in their own pace and we had some upstream participation (Limesurvey) as well.

During the final session, UbuCon Feedback and 2017 plannings, some attendees new to the Ubuntu community commented on how they didn’t know anyone coming into the event. They felt welcome and made many new friends. So much so, there is some serious interest in creating an UbuCon in Romania as a result….let’s do it!

More info here with the event page and the schedule.