back from the Barcelona minidebconf

I'm back home from the MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014 (and I've had a full night of uninterrupted sleep! :) ), so it's time to thank everybody who were there (both in person and via IRC) and especially the organizers who did a great job at creating a welcoming environment and a smooth experience for all of us.

It was my first @Debian community experience (although I had already met a few of the members in various occasions) and it made me glad of my decision to start contributing to the project. (I realize that I've probably met a sanitized and newbie-friendlier version of the community, but it's also made up of people who are working to improve the not-so-friendly parts.)

It was also my first time speaking to an international audience; I believe it went overall well: I'm happy with what I said and how, not so much with what I forgot to say (e.g. mentioning testing and other non-packaging skills in my answer to Enrico's question "what skills are needed in the 3dprinter team", or actually showing the last slide with reference urls — at least this one will be available as soon as I'll send the slides to be uploaded to the site).

Random mentions:

We had free software, and also free beer, from one of the sponsors (I didn't catch which one), but the venue had to remain beer free, which encourages bad puns of the kind I love :)

Contrary to what some people was fearing, the cake was real and not a lie! (also, it tasted like banana bread with chestnut flour).

Video team duty is fun and something I'll do again (and try to use in our local community what I learn in the process), but I don't think I'll let the Galadriel in my mind bully me into subtitling stuff, sorry.

To ease worries of package mistreatment, the cows in the arriero slides looked more like they were moving between pastures in transhumance rather than being led to be slaughtered.

There are curves in Béziers, France (and also bad coffee and great pastries: definitely a better place_with_geek_name to have breakfast than Perl, Germany)!

The stickers with "May I sign your PGP keys" were a nice idea, although they didn't work as well as they could (possibly because there was little time and lots of things to do). I did manage to reduce my dependency on Enrico's key to find trustpaths, however, which is nice :)

I like the idea to draw a pentacle on the floor, and forcing speakers to remain inside, as suggested by a meeting of videoteaming italian cabal members.

Lots of other things I'm forgetting to mention, but now it's time to stop writing this and start work on my todolist where a few things received a priority bump during the conf. :)