Libre Graphics Meeting 2018

I spent the last seven days attending Libre Graphics Meeting in sunny and beautiful Seville. This was my second LGM, the first being six years ago in Vienna, so it was refreshing to be back. I stayed in one of the GIMP apartments near the Alameda de Hércules garden square. Being right in the middle of the city meant that everything of interest was either within walking distance or a short bus ride away.

Unlike other conferences that I have been to, LGM 2018 started at six o’clock in the evening. That was good because one didn’t have to worry about waking up in time not to miss the opening keynote; and you haven’t attended LGM if you haven’t been to the State of Libre Graphics. Other than that I went to Øyvind’s presentation on colour; saw Nara describe her last ten years with Estúdio Gunga; and listened to Dave Crossland and Nathan Willis talk about fonts. There was a lot of live coding based music and algorave going on this year. My favourite was Neil C. Smith’s performance using Praxis LIVE.

All said and done, the highlight of this LGM had to be the GIMP 2.10.0 release at the beginning of the conference. GEGL 0.4.0 was also rolled out to celebrate the occasion. Much happiness and rejoicing ensued.

I spent my time at LGM alternating between delicious tapas, strolling down the narrow and colourful alleys of Seville, sight-seeing, and hacking on GEGL. I started sketching out a proper codec API for GeglBuffer modelled on GdkPixbuf, and continued to performance tune babl, but those are topics for later blog posts.