I've been Near Everest

This is a report of my activities while attending GNOME Asia 2023 in Kathmandu, Nepal. I have given several FOSS conference presentations, but this is my first time I went abroad to deliver it.

I feel at home in Kathmandu, Nepal. Many things are similar between Indonesia and Nepal. Right in front of my hotel, cable installation are spaghetti-like, not far from what we have in Indonesia.

Another important thing is their traffic uses the normal left line, unlike of those some weird countries (that we shouldn't name :D). No suprise here. I can easily do crossing. There are many zebra crosses, but those traffic are never slowing down waiting for you. You have to have an initiative instead. Exactly same situation in Indonesia.

Kathmandu seems to has no high building. My hotel was only 7 floors. Many other buildings around are lower. My hotel have a perfect view for sunrise:

I only have to walk around 300 meters to conference venue. Big factor for me since my stamina was deteriorated significantly after I got COVID-10 Omicron variant.

Initially I was scheduled to give my presentation on the 2nd day, but then swapped into the 1st day:

Presentation slide is in Slideshare.

Several other interesting sessions in this GNOME Asia 2023 are Introduction to writing accessible applications with GTK4 and Fedora 39 Release Party. In his talk about GNOME Accessibility, Federico gave me some ideas (need to be developed further) about possibility to do shortcut conflict checking automatically. Usually when developers make their software, they are aware that some shortcuts in the same menu or dialog might conflict. But when those menus and dialogs are being translated, us translators usually don't have sufficient context to see if our translation have generated conflicted shortcuts. Doing build check and running those applications to manually inspect those shortcut conflicts are not easy to do, especially to have 100% coverage of all menus and dialogs. We also need to consider that some menu or dialog entries might be disabled on some situations, making inspection harder.

After conference, I really want to see Everest my own eye. There are at least 3 alternatives: helicopter tour to Everest base camp (too expensive), 1 hour Everest mountain flight (still too expensive, beware of different pricing for Indian and Pakistani passport holders to foreign ones, usually foreign passport holder got 2x higher), and Nagarkot sunrise. I choose Nagarkot, which was much cheaper. 1 hour car Kathmandu - Nagarkot, then short hike to top of observation hill. You must be brave enough to climb around 5 meter of tower at top of the hill to get unobstructed 360 degrees view.

I was not lucky enough to get clear sunrise. Nor I get a good view of Himalayan mountain. So near but not so lucky to get good weather.

Thanks to GNOME Foundation for providing me travel support to attend this conference.