Review of my year 2019 at Igalia
Co-owner and mentorship
In 2016, I was among the new software engineers who joined Igalia. Three years later I applied to become co-owner of the company and the legal paperwork was completed in April. As my colleague Andy explained on his blog, this does not change a lot of things in practice because most of the decisions are taken within the assembly. However, I’m still very happy and proud of having achieved this step 😄
One of my new duty has been to be the “mentor” of Miyoung Shin since February and to help with her integration at Igalia. Shin has been instrumental in Igalia’s project to improve Chromium’s Code Health with an impressive number of ~500 commits. You can watch the video of her BlinkOn lightning talk on YouTube. In addition to her excellent technical contribution she has also invested her energy in company’s life, helping with the organization of social activities during our summits, something which has really been appreciated by her colleagues. I’m really glad that she has recently entered the assembly and will be able to take a more active role in the company’s decisions!
Working with new colleagues
Igalia also hired Cathie Chen last December and I’ve gotten the chance to work with her as part of our Web Platform collaboration with AMP. Cathie has been very productive and we have been able to push forward several features, mostly related to scrolling. Additionally, she implemented ResizeObserver in WebKit, which is a quite exciting new feature for web developers!
The other project I’ve been contributed to this year is MathML. We are introducing new math and font concepts into Chromium’s new layout engine, so the project is both technically challenging and fascinating. For this project, I was able to rely on Rob’s excellent development skills to complete this year’s implementation roadmap on our Chromium branch and start upstreaming patches.
In addition, a lot of extra non-implementation effort has been done which led to consensus between browser implementers, MathML enthusiasts and other web developer groups. Brian Kardell became a developer advocate for Igalia in March and has been very helpful talking to different people, explaining our project and introducing ideas from the Extensible Web, HTML or CSS Communities. I strongly recommend his recent Igalia chat and lightning talk for a good explanation of what we have been doing this year.
Conferences
These are the developer conferences I attended this year and gave talks about our MathML project:
- April (Toronto): BlinkOn 10 - talk
- October (A Coruña): Web Engines Hackfest 2019 - talk&video
- November (Sunnyvalle): BlinkOn 11 - talk
As usual it was nice to meet the web platform and chromium communities during these events and to hear about the great projects happening. I’m also super excited that the assembly decided to try something new for my favorite event. Indeed, next year we will organize the Web Engines Hackfest in May to avoid conflicts with other browser events but more importantly, we will move to a bigger venue so that we can welcome more people. I’m really looking forward to seeing how things go!
Paris - A Coruña by train
Environmental protection is an important topic discussed in our cooperative. This year, I’ve tried to reduce my carbon footprint when traveling to Igalia’s headquarters by using train instead of plane. Obviously the latter is faster but the former is much more confortable and has less security constraints. It is possible to use high-speed train from Paris to Barcelona and then a Trenhotel to avoid a hotel night. For a quantitative comparison, let’s consider this table, based on my personal travel experience:
| Traject | Transport | Duration | Price | CO2/passenger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paris - Barcelona | TGV | ~6h30 | 60-90€ | 6kg |
| Barcelona - A Coruña | Trenhotel | ~15h | 40-60€ | Unspecified |
| Paris - A Coruña (via Madrid) |
Iberia | 4h30-5h | 100-150€ | 192kg |
The price depends on how early the tickets are booked but it is more or less the same for train and plane. Renfe does not seem to indicate estimated CO2 emission and trains to Galicia are probably not the most eco-friendly. However, using this online estimator, the 1200 kilometers between Barcelona and A Coruña would emit 50kg by national train. This would mean a reduction of 71% in the emission of CO2, which is quite significant. Hopefully things will get better when one day AVE is available between Madrid and A Coruña… 😉