I was lucky enough to be sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to attend the 2019 Linux Application Summit, hosted in Barcelona between November 12th and 15th 2019.

It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud, an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is Rob’s talk on how Flathub would like to help more developers earn money from their work; Adrien on GTK and scalable UIs for phones; Robin on tone of voice and copywriting; Emel on Product Management in the context of GNOME Recipes and Paul Brown on direct language and better communication. There were also great lightning talks including a starring turn by one of my former colleagues Martin Abente Lahaye who showed off the work he’s been doing to make the Sugar educational applications more widely available with Flatpak. After a bit of review and some polish in the cafe they’re now starting to appear on Flathub. All of these videos are available to watch in the YouTube livestream playback, and I’m sure individually soon when appropriately processed.

I gave a talk entitled Product Management In Open Source. Astute readers will recognise the title from the similar talk I gave last year at GUADEC, however the content is actually fairly different. Emel’s talk that I mentioned above covered quite a lot of the basic material so I concentrated more on how individual app developers could use Product Management techniques to make their own practice a bit more deliberate and help them guide and prioritize their work.

If you’d like to watch the video then you’re more than welcome, although I must warn you that I managed to lose my voice a couple of days before so my delivery isn’t exactly what I would wish for. Still, I think you’ll find it worthwhile.