How a broken screen kicked me out of developing an Open Source software and how the community revived it 6 years later When I discovered the FLOSS world, at the dawn of this century, I thought developers were superheroes. Sort of semi-gods that achieved everything I wanted to do with my life like having their face […]
2014 just started and already proved to be a challenging year. First thing, I will have to find or create a new job. After 3 years having the luck of managing open source projects at Lanedo, I’m leaving the company. This is an opportunity for me to try something new, to get out of my […]
The main concept behind Getting Things GNOME is that everything, absolutely everything is a task. Writing a book is a task. Developing an operating system is a task. Climbing mount Everest is task. Taking out the trash is a task. Everything.
I agree. It’s terribly not romantic. But true. Like saying that every poem is just a bunch of ink on a paper. Not romantic but efficient. Better: building a system to handle every task could be a game changer, a disruptive innovation affecting the society.
It might be long but stay with me: I will describe a generic task, a generic task manager and how it will change the world.
Some of you may be aware that Getting Things GNOME! 0.3 was released. What you may not know is that GTG is now using a python library called liblarch and that liblarch 2.1.0 was released today.
Liblarch is a python library specifically designed to handle complex trees (including directed acyclic graphs) and to display them. A liblarch-gtk component allows you to display different views of your tree in a GTK TreeView widget without any effort.
During the development of GTG, we faced major problems to handle our tree of tasks and our tree of tags. The features we wanted proved to be very complex to implement and very fragile : solving a bug would create two others. And the performance work was a nightmare.
We decided to abstract the whole concept of tree and to make it a standalone, well tested and optimized library. We are very proud of it and we are looking for more applications that would benefit from using liblarch.
For several years now, I’ve been a Summer of Code mentor for Getting Things Gnome, under the GNOME umbrella.
This year again we received plenty of student proposals. GTG being a very small part of the GNOME project and having only few mentors available, we had to choose. That choice was sometimes really hard and it’s a pity to see some students not being selected.
In order to help them for next year, I would like to point what we, potential mentors, expect from the students.
TLDR: GTG 0.2.9 has been released, spread the word!.
For those who don’t know Getting Things GNOME yet, it is a todo manager. In fact, it is, to my knowledge, the only todo manager that :
As a result, gtg was in the Techradar’s top 50 best Linux application of 2011 despite the lack of regular releases. It is probably packaged as « gtg » in your distribution so it is probably better that you try by yourself.
I know I’m very late, but I really wanted to talk about this year Google Summer of Code.
For the third year in a row, I was a mentor. And this year I have a huge deception to share. I’m really sad. This week, I’v received the GSoC 2011 t-shirt. They sent me the wrong size. XXXL. I can use it as a sleeping bag with my girlfriend. I’m really disappointed.
Hopefully, GSoC is not only about receiving a t-shirt. It is also about mentoring a student.
Afin de gérer le stress et éviter la procrastination, j’ai dévelopé la méthode GARI (Glande Appliquée – Rangement Interdit). Vous vous souvenez ? Le monsieur au fond se souvient et il dit même que j’avais tout pompé sur GTD, ce qui est en partie vrai. Mais il nous restait à trouver un bon moyen pour gérer ma liste de choses à faire.
Quand on y pense, tout n’est jamais qu’une série de tâches. Déplacer une montagne paraît bien plus facile lorsqu’on le fait un caillou à la fois. Même si ça fait un peu tâche… (hihi, tâche, vous comprenez ? Jeu de mot subtil et raffiné).
Short version : GTG! 0.2 is out
Last year, I met several times with my friend Bertrand to discuss how we imagine a good GTD tasks manager. On October 17 2008, Bertrand told me that he had a funny idea for a name and I immediately created the project and commited my first try with a GTK TextView widget.
2 months later (exactly one year ago), what we had was a kind of buggy monstrous experiment.
Each year, Google is sponsoring a Summer of Code (SoC). During three months, Google pay students to work on various opensource projects. Each student should be followed by a « mentor » from the original project but the mentor is not paid, he receives a tshirt.
3 years ago, I was a SoC student and developed the now abandoned Conseil but I learned a lot from that experience.
This year, one of the GNOME SoC projects was related to Getting Things GNOME!, the software I started with Bertrand. The project was to add the concept of geolocalization to your tasks list so you would be able to see where you can do tasks. The candidate, Paulo Cabido, seemed bright and skilled. I was the mentor. Strange to be on the other side of the fence.