I noticed today that I have been attending the Gulaschprogrammiernacht (GPN) for 10 years now.

I specifically remember the talk “What’s cooking in GNOME?” by Tobias Mueller about the GNOME project at GPN14. He talked about Gnome doing releases every 6 months, while the distributions do releases every half a year (27:30) and how Gnome software compiles compared to enlightenment. Also in this talk, he mentioned the GUADEC in 2014 in Strasbourg, which I visited briefly as I was in the city with my school class at the time. It is amazing to think that I have given a talk at GPN in 2024 at the same stage as Tobias did 10 years ago. In some way I am impressed by this realization.

I probably attended previous GPNs, but I don’t have any specific memories of them. I am happy to be part of organizing the event now. I look forward to the next 10 years of GPN and the many more events to come.

Update 27.06.2025: I remembered another GPN I attended, it must have been GPN8 in 2009. I remember because it was during Ursula von der Leyens tenure as Minister of Family Affairs. She proposed to force ISPs to present literal “Stop Signs” to users when they visit illegal websites. The people at GPN were not happy about this and people were printing out stop signs and putting them on other people’s signs as a joke like this.

This post should really be titled “16 Years of GPN”.