Joaquim Rocha
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GUADEC’s over, time for Japan

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    Joaquim Rocha
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  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

GUADEC

The last couple of week were very busy for me. Apart from having organized the GUADEC‘s keynotes (with the much appreciated help of Dave Neary and Karen), I gave two talks as mentioned in my previous post.

For the Skeltrack one I was happy that I changed the format of the talk: back in LinuxTag I talked mainly about the technical side of the library, how it worked on the inside; for GUADEC, however, I preferred to give a higher level overview of Skeltrack and other neat things we do in Igalia‘s Interactivity team. The live demo worked very well (considering it had fresh code from the previous night) and people seemed to have enjoyed it (surprisingly live demos are cooler than talking about graph stuff, go figure…) 😀 .

The already much praised organization was really like that. The GPUL guys know how to pull it off. So much for the European joke where “Germans organize, French cook and Spanish entertain”, huh! Congrats guys.

Vacation: BCN > Japan

In a few hours I’ll be traveling to what may very probably be the trip of my life: Japan. Ever since I was a little kid I was very attracted to Eastern cultures. Later, when I was a teenager, I was really into anime, manga and all that stuff. Back then I already knew I wanted to work with technology but I wasn’t sure if this was something more like an artist (yes, I drew/painted and I sometimes still do it) rather than a more hardcore role like a programmer. Thus, this Japanese “pop” culture and mainly computer games had a strong influence on why I did a CS degree and earn my life today as a programmer.

For these reasons, I am more than excited to go to Japan. I’m also staying a couple of days in Barcelona before the main trip, it’ll be my first time visiting the city as well but with all the excitement for Japan it feels like I’m just passing by some random and regular city 🙂 Still, I’m sure tomorrow I’ll come to my senses and enjoy this beautiful Catalan city I’ve wanted to visit for a long time as well (I’ll be also stopping Igalia’s Barcelona office and I heard there is a nice roof top where my colleagues could share their beers with me).

Of course I need to mention languages when talking about traveling! Most of the Japanese I knew as a teenager is now gone but I’ll try to catch up; I got a small conversation book I haven’t read in ages but it’s gonna be a long flight anyway.

Not much in this trip has been planned in advance (picking tickets doesn’t count) so if you have some remarkable place you think I should visit, apart from the obvious ones, let me know (I’ll start off in Kyoto). I will also probably blog about it afterwards like I’ve done for most of my main trips.

See you in Japan!