So its been a few days since Guadec (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) ended, and I’ve still not blogged about it.
It was nice to see a few familiar faces, and meet some more.

What rocked:

• Keynotes - They were all pretty good, I especially liked the ones on usability and the future of the ‘net.
• Employers - Passing out their business cards and contact details.
• Welcome party - Beer was OK, and there were lots of great people. Officially there was 1 FREE beer (token) per person, but the staff started giving out more tokens as the night went on. — Nice one.
• SMASHED (Single Malt Appreciation Society for Hackers, Engineers and Developers) - it was on a boat!
• SWAG - All registered attendees received a nice laptop bag with all of the sponsors logos on, a couple of t-shirts (with Guadec and Bazaar on them), some leaflets and maps of istanbul, a whopping great 4GB Mandriva Flash pen drive and other various Imendio and Gnome branded goodies.

What didn’t:

• Mark Shuttleworth did not turn up to SMASHED.
• The FREE beer at the Google party was awful, there we tons of free beer tokens left everywhere.
  The DJ also had the music so load that it completely killed conversation (and would not turn it down), and to top it all off, not a single person from Google showed up. — Nice one Google.

All in all it was a pretty good first Guadec for me, I will definitely be going next year.