In preparation for this year's Brno doc sprint, I stubbed and indexed some pages for the Boxes help that Baptiste and I started a year ago. Zeeshan arranged to make a personal appearance, and when we convened at DevConf, his mere presence put to flight a nagging libvirt problem I was having with jhbuild. While answering some pointed interface questions from Kat, he executed a maneuver to connect remotely to a box that was tricky and yet still arcane. I began testing and writing Boxes help content, noting a few bugs to be filed later, then reviewed and edited some Terminal pages for Kat and Sindhu.

A design review with formidable bowling opponents Allan and Andreas was followed by a brainstorming session for the new GNOME Help landing page layout, integrating Getting Started. (Our first suggestion was renaming it to Get started to comply with GNOME help conventions.) Petr had been working on Getting Started for some time (with Jakub, who weighed in remotely on the redesign on Monday), and he and Jim immediately began implementing the user help layout. Shaun contributed his technical wizardry from afar, proving Mallard and Yelp to be as remarkable as advertized.

 

On Tuesday I began reviewing the changes to Settings for 3.8. In aid of this I was keeping an up-to-date OSTree image, and I demonstrated it to the group. I hit a Gjs bug while jhbuilding gnome-ostree, but Dave quickly diagnosed and submitted a patch for it. Jim got to work documenting the new Privacy panel. Marta worked on developer tutorials while Jana attacked bugs. Errant Gitorious repositories were repatriated with Dave's obscure Git incantations. Cheese continued to be pickled.

A number of team members couldn't make it this year (some due to unforeseen emergencies), and they were missed. André inspired us all when he forewent an entire night of sleep just to be able to join us for a day and a half. Sindhu was only able to participate by Google Hangout, but the sounds of India emanating from the speaker transported our ordinary university classroom to another world.

Brno proved again to be an excellent venue for the hackfest. Thanks to Petr, Jana, and Red Hat for their hospitality. Special thanks to Florian for being our organizer, tour guide and shepherd, anticipating all of our dietary and public transit needs, and keeping us entertained with his subtle humour. Thank you GNOME Foundation for the sponsorship.

As always, it's a privilege to be able to participate as a member of Shaun's documentation team, making lasting friendships, and working together to contribute to something exceptional.