WebKitGtk+ Hackfest 2010

I attended the WebKitGtk+ Hackfest held this month at the Igalia office, located in Coruña, Spain. It was a great opportunity for me to meet the WebKitGtk+ maintainers directly. This hackfest was sponsored by Collabora and Igalia. The Igalia office was very nice; in terms of atmosphere, it can be compared to a Google office. There were free snacks, beverages, and game consoles in the office. Moreover, we had a buffet lunch every day. I'd like to thank Collabora and Igalia for sponsoring the hackfest, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my trip to Coruña.

During the hackfest, we concentrated on hacking WebKitGtk+ to fix bugs and implement new features, only stopping to sleep and eat. Of course, we also made time for a city tour in Coruña for a quarter of a day.

Gtk+ and libSoup maintainers also attended the hackfest to support the WebKitGtk+ maintainers, because WebKitGtk+ depends on those libraries. Moreover, embracing Gtk+3 required the Gtk+ maintainers' help to keep pace with the Gtk+3 changes. An Epiphany browser maintainer also joined the hackfest to fix Epiphany bugs together with the WebKitGtk+ maintainers.

(CC) 2010 Mario

On the first day, we listed all of the work items on the chalkboard (as you can see in the picture above). When we finished each item, we rewarded ourselves with the Super Mario theme. :-) You can see the performance video here:

Martin finished a task! YEAH! from diegoe on Vimeo.

During the hackfest, I worked on viewport meta tag support and some missing features in the DRT test in WebKitGtk+. In addition, I improved the WebKit cache model feature. In particular, I was pleased to finish the viewport meta tag patch. Actually, it might have been impossible without the maintainers' help: Kov, Martin, and Xan reviewed my patch carefully and improved it, so I'd like to thank them again. I'll explain the details of the viewport meta tag support later.

After the hackfest, I felt like I was a member of the WebKitGtk+ development team. In the future, I will try to contribute more patches to WebKitGtk+.

You can also find this post in a Korean version. :-)

Happy New Year, and thanks again for reading!