As my Outreachy internship with GNOME concludes, I’m reflecting on the journey, the effort, the progress, and, most importantly, the future I envision in tech.

The past few months as an intern have been both challenging and incredibly rewarding. From quickly learning a new programming language to meet project demands, to embracing test-driven development and tackling progressively complex tasks, every experience has been a stepping stone. Along the way, I’ve honed my collaboration and communication skills, expanded my professional network, and developed a deep appreciation for the power of community and open source.

This Outreachy internship has been a pivotal experience, solidifying these values and teaching me the importance of embracing challenges and continuously improving my technical and interpersonal skills, preparing me for the next stage of my engineering career. The supportive environment I found in the GNOME community has been instrumental to my growth. I’m incredibly grateful for my mentor, Federico, who exemplified what true mentorship should be. He showed me the importance of collaborative spirit, genuine understanding of team members, and even taking time for laughter – all of which made transitioning to a new environment seamless and comfortable. His guidance fostered open communication, ensuring seamless synchronization and accessibility. Just before writing this, I had a call with Federico, Felipe (the GNOME Internship Coordinator, an awesome person!), and Aryan to discuss my career post-internship.

While the career advice was invaluable, what truly stood out was their collaborative willingness to support my growth. This dedication to fostering progress is something I deeply admire and will strive to make a core part of my own engineering culture.

My journey from intern to engineer has been significantly shaped by the power of community, and I’m now ready to push myself further, take on new challenges, and build a solid, impactful, and reputable career in technology.

Skills

I possess a strong foundation in several key technologies essential for software and infrastructure engineering.

My primary languages are Golang and Rust , allowing me to build high-performance and reliable systems. I also have experience with Python. I’m a quick learner and eager to expand my skillset further.

Career Goals

My ultimate career aspiration is to secure a role that challenges me to grow as an engineer while contributing to impactful and innovative projects. I am particularly drawn to:

• • Cultivating a culture of creativity and structured development while optimizing myself to become the best engineer I can be—just like my Outreachy experience.
  • Developing and sustaining critical infrastructure that powers large-scale, globally utilized systems, ensuring reliability, security, and seamless operation.
  • Exploring opportunities at MANGA or other big tech companies to work on complex systems, bridging software engineering, security, and infrastructure.

• Motivation

While the challenge of growth is my primary motivation, the financial stability offered by these roles is also important, enabling me to further invest in my personal and professional development.

Relocation is a significant draw, offering the opportunity to experience different cultures, gain new perspectives and immerse myself in a global engineering community.

As an introverted and private person, I see this as a chance to push beyond my comfort zone, engage with a diverse range of collaborators, and build meaningful connections.

Job Search

I am actively seeking software engineering, infrastructure, and site reliability roles. I am particularly interested in opportunities at large tech companies, where I can contribute to complex systems and further develop my expertise in Golang and Rust after concluding my Outreachy internship with Gnome is concluded in march 2025.

exploring the opportunities

I’m eager to explore software engineering, open source, infrastructure, and site reliability roles. If your team is seeking someone with my skills and experience, I’d welcome a conversation. Connect with me via email or LinkedIn .

I’m excited about the future and ready to take the next step in my career. With the foundation I’ve built during this internship, I’m confident in my ability to make a meaningful impact in the tech industry

We just had a GTK hackfest at FOSDEM. A good time for an update on whats new and exciting in GTK, with an eye towards 4.18.

Requirements

You can no longer call gdk_display_get_default() or gdk_display_open() before gtk_init(). This was causing problems due to incomplete initialization, so we made it fail with a (hopefully clear) error message. If you are affected by this, the usual fix is to just call gtk_init() as early as possible.

On Windows, we have a hard requirement on Windows 10 now. All older versions are long unsupported, and having to deal with a maze of ifdefs and unavailable APIs makes development harder than it should be. Dropping support for very old versions also simplifies the code down the stack, in Pango and GLib.

The same idea applies to macOS, where we now require macOS 10.15.

Spring cleaning

The old GL renderer has been removed. This may be unwelcome news for people stuck on very old drivers and hardware. But we will continue to make the new renderers work as well as possible on the hardware that they can support.

The X11 and Broadway backends have been deprecated, as a clear signal that we intend to remove them in the GTK 5. In the meantime, they continue to be available. We have also deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow, since it needs a new design. The replacement will appear in libadwaita, hopefully next cycle.

It is worth reminding everybody that there is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon yet.

Incremental improvements

Widget layout and size allocation has received quite a bit of attention this cycle, with the goal of improving performance (by avoiding binary search as much as possible) and correctness. Nevertheless, these changes have some potential for breakage, so if you see wrong or suboptimal layouts in applications, please let us know.

GTK has had difficulties for a while getting its pointer sizes right with fractional scaling on Wayland, but this should all be solved in GTK 4.18. No more huge pointers. Fixing this also required changes on the mutter side.

New beginnings

Accessibility in GTK 4.18 is taking a major step forward, with the new AccessKit backend, which gives us accessibility on  Windows and macOS, for the very first time. The at-spi backend is still the default on Linux, and has seen a number of improvements as well.

And, maybe the biggest news: We have an Android backend now. It is still experimental, so you should expect some rough edges and loose ends. For example, there is no GL renderer support yet. But it is exciting that you can just try gtk4-demo on your phone now, and have it mostly work.

Enjoy!

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 24 to January 31.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Allan Day reports

GNOME changed its UI and monospace fonts this week, in a long anticipated change that is planned for GNOME 48. The new fonts are called Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono. Adwaita Sans is a modified version of Inter, and replaces Cantarell as the UI font. Adwaita Mono is a modified version of Iosevka, and replaces Source Code Pro as the default monospace font. This feature was implemented by Jamie Gravendeel, with last-minute assistance from Florian Muellner.

Libadwaita

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

libadwaita now provides API for accessing the system monospace and document fonts, both programmatically and from CSS .

Additionally, the .monospace style class uses the system font now, instead of monospace , so apps don’t need to access it themselves from the settings portal and gsettings anymore

GTK

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi says

The GTK developers held a hackfest in Brussels, covering various topics:

• accessibility
• text rendering
• deprecations
• new Android backend
• GTK5 features

A full report will be published on the GTK development blog , so keep a keen eye for it

Text Editor

Text Editor is a simple text editor that focus on session management.

Allan Day announces

Some news from a previous week: a collection of design updates have appeared in Text Editor, in time for the upcoming GNOME 48 release. The changes include a new document sidebar, which combines document properties and settings. There is also a new floating line/column indicator.

Settings

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Allan Day reports

Work continued on GNOME’s new Digital Wellbeing features this week. Changes were made to allow screen time to be viewed independently of the screen time limit feature, and a setting was added to allow screen time recording to be disabled. The labels in the settings panel were also polished. Much of this work was made possible by an Endless grant to the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth (he/him) reports

This week Iotas was accepted into GNOME Circle. Iotas aims to provide distraction-free note taking, and lets you sync your notes across devices with Nextcloud. Congratulations!

Hieroglyphic

Find LaTeX symbols

FineFindus says

A new Hieroglyphic update has been released, bringing a number of improvements:

• Improved classifier, which now includes the nearly 500 user-contributed symbols, thanks to everyone who helped.
• The backend infrastructure has been updated to make it easier for future improvements to the classifier.
• The drawing area has been rewritten to use GTK4’s rendering capabilities instead of Cairo.

Graphs

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl reports

This week we released version 1.8.4 of Graphs, it’s a minor release primarily focusing on the update to the GNOME 47 runtime:

• Update to the GNOME 47 runtime, with support for accent colours.
• The rubberband on the canvas has been improved, now it has rounded corners similar to Nautilus
• Equation parsing has been improved, now handling edge-cases better. It’s now also completely case-insensitive, meaning “Pi” and “PI” are both acceptable variants of the greek letter π.

Meanwhile we’re working hard on the next major release. The latest main channel on our Gitlab now has support for actual equations spanning an infinite canvas, and operations are calculated analytically with the equations changing their names accordingly. We’ve also got a brand new style-editor with a live preview. Stay tuned for an announcement on this later on, in the meantime you can check out the upcoming release on the Flathub beta channel.

Gaphor

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan announces

This week Dan Yeaw release Gaphor 3.0. This release is a major step forward. It contains a lot of UI updates. In addition Gaphor’s internal data models has been updated and improved. More details you can find in this blog post . You can find the latest version in Flatpak. macOS and Windows versions are available from our website .

Third Party Projects

Fractal

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

How are you going to find your friends and coordinate end of day drinks when you’re lost in the middle of a large crowd in a big city? With the new version of your favorite Matrix client, of course! Here is Fractal 10.

• The QR code scanning code has been ported to libaperture , the library behind GNOME Camera. This should result in better performance and more reliability.
• OAuth 2.0 compatibility was added, to make sure that we are ready for the upcoming authentication changes for matrix.org .
• Pills for users and rooms mentions show consistently in the right place instead of seemingly random places, getting rid of one of our oldest and most annoying bug.
• Attachments go through the send queue, ensuring correct order of all messages and improving the visual feedback.
• Videos were often not playing after loading in the room history. This was fixed, and we also show properly when an error occurred.
• We were downloading too many different sizes for avatar images, which would fill the media cache needlessly. We now only download a couple of sizes. This has the extra benefit of fixing blurry or missing thumbnails in notifications.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies .

This version is available right now on Flathub .

We have a lot of improvements in mind for our next release, but if you want a particular feature to make it, the surest way is to implement it yourself! Start by looking at our issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room .

Parabolic

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.1.4 was also released this week with some new features and fixes!

Here’s the full changelog:

• Added a new Embed Thumbnails option in Preferences to enable/disable Parabolic’s downloading of thumbnails separate from metadata
• Added a disclaimer about embedding thumbnails/subtitles when using generic file types
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect previous video and/or audio format was selected
• Fixed an issue where chapters were embedded even if the option was disabled
• Fixed an issue where splitting media by chapters would result in incorrect media lengths in the split files
• Fixed an issue where video and audio formats were not selectable on GNOME

Events

Kristi Progri reports

CFP for Linux App Summit 2025 is now open! Join us in Tirana, Albania on April 25-26th. Submit your paper by Feb 15th https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/7/

For more information and updates check our website: https://linuxappsummit.org/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

• Up earlyish, tech planning call, plugged away at mail and task backlog.
• Published strip #3 early - two in one week!? a FOSDEM special; explaining open roads:
  
  
• Meeting with a partner; out to the inaugural ceremony of the European Open Source Awards, talked to smart people until late.

Introduction Built on jj and fzf, jj-fzf offers a text-based user interface (TUI) that simplifies complex versioning control operations like rebasing, squashing, and merging commits. This post will guide you through integrating jj-fzf into your Emacs workflow, allowing to switch between emacs and jj…

I finally got distracted enough to finish my website that has been saying "under construction" for over a year, since I set up this server for my Sharkey instance.

I've wanted to do this for a while - one, so that I actually have a home page, and two, so that I can move my blog here instead of using WordPress.

Setup

Initially I wanted to use a static generator like Hugo, but then I discovered that the web server I'm using ( Caddy ) can do templates . That's perfectly enough for a simple blog, so I don't actually need a separate generator. This very article is a markdown document , parsed and embedded into a nice-looking page and RSS feed using templates.

In addition, I get all the niceties I couldn't get before:

• Using Markdown instead of HTML with WordPress-specific additions for e.g. image galleries.

• Proper code listings with syntax highlighting (you'll have to view this on the original page though, not from Planet GNOME or your RSS reader):

  <property name="child">
    <object class="AdwToastOverlay" id="toast_overlay">
      <property name="child">
        <object class="AdwNavigationView" id="nav_view"/>
      </property>
    </object>
  </property>
  

• Dark mode support, incl. for images (again, no clue if this works on Planet GNOME):

  Me writing this very post in Apostrophe

• Just simple niceties like smaller monospace font - I do this a lot and I don't particularly like the way the WordPress theme I was using presents it.

• Finally, while migrating my old posts I had an opportunity to update broken links (such as to the old documentation) and add missing alt text as in quite a few images I set WordPress description instead of alt text and never noticed. If you really want the old version, it's still on the old website and each migrated article links to its original counterpart.

So yeah, so far this was fairly pleasant, I expected much worse. There are still a bunch of things I want to add (e.g. previewing images at full size on click), but it's not like my old blog had that either.

As I've done some times previous years, I thought it would be appropriate to give a bit of a status update on goings on with regards to Maps before heading for this year's FOSDEM

Refreshed Location Marker

One of the things that landed since the December update are the new revamped location markers

The marker now uses the system accent color, and sports a “torch” indicating the current heading (when known).

And the circle indicating approximate accuracy of the location now has an outer contour.

And on these notes, I would also like to take the opportunity to mention the BeaconDB project ( https://beacondb.net/ ) with the goal of building a community-sourced wireless positioning database. It is compatible the now-defunct Mozilla Location Service (MLS) and works as a drop-in-replacement with GeoClue.

Improved Visuals for Public Transit Routes Lists

The “badges” showing line numbers/names for public transit journeys, and markers for shown on the map when selecting a trip has been improved to avoid some odd label alignments and better looking contours (on lower contrast against light or dark background). The labels are now drawn directly using GSK instead of piggy-backing on a GtkLabel, doing some Cairo drawing on top of that. One additional benefit here is that it also gets rid of some of the remaining usages of the GdkPixbuf APIs (which will be gone in a future GTK 5).

Transitous Move to MOTIS 2

On the subject of transit, Transitous has now migrated to the new MOTIS 2 API. And consequently the support in Maps has been updated to use the new API (this is also backported to the stable 47.3 release).

The new API is easier to use, and more in-line with the internal data types in Maps, so the code was also a bit simpler. Also now with the new API we get the walking instructions directly from MOTIS instead of using GraphHopper to compute walking  “legs”. This has made searching for routes in Maps quite a bit faster as well.

FOSDEM

And when talking about FOSDEM, me, Felix Gündling, and Jonah Brüchert will host a talk about Transitous in the “Railways and Open Transport” devroom (K.6.401) on Sunday @ 16:30 CET

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4105-gnome-maps-meets-transitous-meets-motis/

So maybe see you in FOSDEM!

• Planning call; sync with Karen, lunch.
• Published strip #2 early, FOSDEM travel coming up; an introduction to community road building:
  
  

• Up earlyish, mail chew - a lot of conference backlog. Sync with Lily, Miklos, Marketing team, Naomi, Pedro, Eloy.
• Dug through urgent conference notes, wrote status reports, tried to get to code review.