Belated introduction to the foundation (Yay! I'm a member!)

[Guillaume Emont <guijemont igalia com>]

I am posting this about two months late, but I am now a proud member of the
GNOME Foundation[1]. Therefore, I would like to introduce myself to the other
Foundation members and tell a bit of my history with the GNOME project and
technologies.

TL;DR I did a few small things here and there related to GNOME, and generally
like to play with multimedia technologies.

My name is Guillaume Emont, though some people call me Guij, which is sort of
an abbreviation of my irc nickname, which is guijemont (you can find me at
least on #grilo and #gstreamer).
I think I first discovered GNOME a long time ago (I'd say circa 2000), and
liked it, but didn't really use it on a regular basis, partly because I didn't
find it obscure and "leet" enough (yeah, I was a stupid teenager), and partly
because I didn't have a lot of RAM on my computer then, therefore going towards
minimalism (you know, Window Maker).
In these old days, as a project in high school, I made a small "remote control"
client/server application using GTK+, because I wanted to learn "for real" C,
GTK+ and socket programming. It was a lot of fun, and I really hope that this
code is lost forever, because I think it was really ugly. After that, I didn't
touch much GNOME technologies for a while.
By about 2005, I was more mature and RAM was less of an issue, and GNOME
naturally became my default environment, seduced that I was by its focus on
simplicity.
I graduated in 2006 and took my first job in a proprietary software company. I
should admit that it's probably where I learned how to write good code, partly
by working with great people, and partly by seeing a lot of counter examples
;).

I quickly became tired of the proprietary software culture, and got the
opportunity to go work for Fluendo in sunny Barcelona in 2007. I worked there
for about two years and half with a lot of marvellous and clever people. I was
in the part of Fluendo that was making the (now mostly dead) Elisa/Moovida
media center. There I had the opportunity to contribute a lot to two nice
C/GObject projects: pigment[2] and GStreamer. That's also where I got my black
belt in python and developed a hatred for the old style GObject bindings (long
live to GObject Introspection!).
In these days, I also started work on a C/GObject animation framework called
PAF[3] that's been on hold forever, even though it's almost in a usable state,
but might still be relevant for Clutter, or even GTK+, if I get enough people
to motivate me into finishing this. I don't know what's the current status of
Clutter and its animation tools. (note: PAF is not a graphic library, just a
tool to "animate variables" that could be used with about any graphic library).

More recently, I started to work for Igalia[4] in October 2010. I am very proud
of being part of that group of great hackers, with quite a few of them active
in GNOME. There I've been hacking on various things, the most relevant here
being some work on GStreamer, with various patches here and there, an image
stabilisation element[5] about which I talked at the GStreamer conference[6]
and at FOSDEM[7]. I am currently working on some experimentations to put the
demuxing and decoding in a sandbox[8], because you don't want to trust that
"video from the internet", do you? It's mostly a proof of concept that only
works on my machine for now, but I should blog[9] about it soon. You might or
might not see that appear on planet gnome[10].
I have also been working quite a bit on Grilo[11], which is progressing nicely
and getting some importance in the world of GNOME multimedia things.
I also went to the last desktop summit and to the GObject Introspection
hackfest that followed. I started fixing a bug[12] there, but I probably need
to get my arse kicked a bit to make me finish that work (I can be very lazy).

I am sorry for writing so long an email, and want to thank the few courageous
who got to read it fully, may we share a lot of beer at the next GUADEC!
Hopefully, the length of this message justifies that I am sending it two months
late ;).

Cheers,

Guij


[1] http://www.gnome.org/news/2012/02/welcome-to-more-new-gnome-foundation-members/
[2] a bit like Clutter, with a lot of potential, but unfortunately mostly
    abandoned https://launchpad.net/pigment
[3] http://live.gnome.org/PAF
[4] http://www.igalia.com/
[5] http://www.gitorious.org/gststabilizer
[6] http://gstconf.ubicast.tv/videos/time-lapse-and-stabilizing-a-sequence-of-images/
[7] http://video.fosdem.org/2012/lightningtalks/Hacking_in_the_real_world.webm
[8] https://github.com/guijemont/Sandboxed-Player
[9] http://emont.org/blog/
[10] any planet gnome admin reading this? Please have a look at
     https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656656
[11] http://live.gnome.org/Grilo
[12] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558620