Darshan Upadhyay
COOL Days 2026: 100+ People, 3 Days, Hamburg
At the end of April, more than 100 staff, partners, customers, contributors and community members came together in Hamburg for COOL Days 2026 — three days of talks, panels, workshops, roadmap discussions, demos, and plenty of pizza 😉
The programme covered everything from COOL 26.04 features and AI integrations to the new Collabora Office for desktop, mobile apps, accessibility, performance, and deep integration work. Nearly 100 deep dives and lightning talks showcased how much of the progress happens not just in headline features, but in the careful, practical improvements that make daily use better for everyone.
Beyond the sessions, the Partner Track and Integration Workshops gave partners and customers direct space to share feedback, discuss priorities, and work through real deployment challenges — the kind of detailed conversations that don’t fit into a normal conference schedule.
And of course, there were the evenings — the OSSCars awards, dinner on an ex-lighthouse ship in Hamburg harbour, and a trip to Miniatur Wunderland. Open source communities are built through code, but they’re also built through trust and time spent together.
For the full recap, read the COOL Days 2026 blog post.
The Monorepo Is Real — And Shipping
The unification of the core and online repositories is done. iOS builds and translations are integrated. The core engine now lives under engine/ as a subfolder, dictionaries are merged directly in, and the monorepo is live on Gerrit:
👉 gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/online
What’s still in progress: Windows and Android builds on main, plus --enable-coplugin, fuzzer, and lighthouse support. The GitHub mirror is being set up — once it’s live, GitHub becomes read-only and the existing online.git README will point contributors to Gerrit.
CI for the monorepo is being brought up by Szymon and Mohit. Current success rate on the monorepo main branch is at 52% — still climbing, but the hard infrastructure work is behind us.
The Numbers
In the three weeks since our last post, 1,209 commits have been merged by 44 contributors
All-time totals since April 2nd: 1,834 commits merged from 60 contributors — in just seven weeks.
For context: Week #1 had 286 merges. Week #2 had 376. These last three weeks? Over 1,200. The pace is accelerating.
New Contributors Are Showing Up — From Everywhere
This is the part that makes an open source project feel alive. New people aren’t just watching — they’re submitting patches, fixing bugs, and improving the codebase.
Jakub Trzebiatowski (ubap) dove straight into core Writer table logic, landing multiple patches around table renaming, formula updates, and chart data links — all reviewed and merged by Miklos:
Phani from Nix@NGI is working on a Collabora Office NixOS package — bringing Collabora Office to the Nix ecosystem. The announcement is being prepared.
Nistor Mario Peter contributed a clean code improvement: using insert() instead of loops for adding multiple values to containers.
Matei Vasiliu tackled tdf#145759: replacing buffer size magic numbers with constants.
Stefan Alexandru Vladut submitted a patch to convert Result to an enum class in urihelper.
George Herasteanu worked on tdf#145614: converting #define macros to enum or constexpr.
These are exactly the kind of contributions that make a codebase healthier — cleaning up legacy patterns, improving type safety, replacing magic numbers. Every one of them matters.
Getting Started Just Got Easier
We want the barrier to entry as low as possible. Two things landed this month to help:
Your First Pull Request guide — a step-by-step walkthrough for submitting your first patch on Gerrit, from account setup to pushing your change: 👉 Your First Pull Request
clone-online.sh — a brand new interactive setup script that walks you through everything: SSH key setup, Gerrit registration, cloning the monorepo, and optionally building engine + online. It’s designed for non-technical users — every step is interactive and explains what’s happening and why. There’s also a clone-online.md companion doc alongside it.
If you’ve been thinking about contributing but didn’t know where to start, these are for you.
What Developers Are Building
From the TC meeting and community calls, here’s what’s actively being worked on:
Major Cleanups Approved: The TC approved a significant list of code cleanups — removing large parts of Base, stripping platform-dependent VCL code for Windows and macOS, removing canvas and slideshow modules, cleaning up sal/ string classes, and XML-based theming in VCL. This is deliberate, focused work to make the codebase leaner and more maintainable.
CODE 26.04 Release: Targeting release in approximately 3 weeks, with weekly release candidates. Translation integration is done. Packaging jobs for COOL and CODE are being written.
Collabora Office for Desktop: The plan to release Collabora Office from the same 26.04 code-base — for Windows, Mac, and Linux — continues to move forward.
Vector Rendering and Dynamic Arrays: Tomaž is pushing forward vector rendering and implementing dynamic arrays (spill) for Calc.
Python 3.14 Support: Michael S is bringing Python 3.14 to the main branch, with Windows support still being worked on.
Safari Print Fix: Attila tracked down why printing in Safari on Mac sometimes failed to display the document — a timing issue where Safari’s print dialog doesn’t wait for the rendered image. A fix with display handling is in the works.
Accessibility: Bayram continues systematic accessibility improvements across Calc — dialog focus, format cells screen reader support, and shape tab focus handling.
Impress Dynamic Zoom: Sahil is building dynamic zoom for Impress on Gerrit, with feature commits and code refactors in progress.
AI Integration: Vivek is working on AI configuration, EU compliance notices, and UI/UX polish for the AI chat sidebar. Ivana is designing voice tone for the AI assistant.
Custom Cursors — PNG to SVG: Ivana is continuing the cursor inventory and redesign — making all cursors resolution-independent SVGs.
Crash Testing: Caolán’s crash testing dropped from 776 crashes to 547, with continuous fixes being built and applied.
The Forum and Matrix: Where the Community Lives
The Development category on the forum continues to grow as a real hub for technical discussion. All meeting minutes are published openly — TC meetings, weekly community calls, and UX/UI design meetings — all tagged and searchable under meeting-minutes.
Community members are asking questions about submitting patches, sharing deployment configurations, and helping each other out. The forum thread “How to submit a patch?” is a sign of healthy growth — people are here and they want to contribute.
On Matrix (#cool-dev), the daily developer chat continues to be where coordination happens in real time — debugging, reviews, quick questions, and helping newcomers get set up.
Three Weekly Calls, All in the Open
The rhythm of regular community calls is now well established:
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TC Meeting — technical decisions, release engineering, patch review stats, CI status. Latest minutes (May 13)
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Collabora Online Weekly Meeting — broader community updates, contributor status, release schedules, testing. Meeting #256
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UX/UI Design Meeting — design collaboration, cursor redesign, AI assistant UI, accessibility, notebookbar improvements.
All minutes are published on the forum. No closed doors.
Get Involved
New contributors are landing patches every week. The setup script takes minutes. The community is welcoming. If you’ve been thinking about it, now is the time.
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Your first pull request: forum.collaboraonline.com/t/your-first-pull-request/41
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Setup script: clone-online.sh on Gerrit
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Community page: collaboraonline.github.io/post/communicate/
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Forum: forum.collaboraonline.com
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Chat on Matrix: #cool-dev:matrix.org
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Browse open changes: gerrit.collaboraoffice.com
See you in the code.
