Akademy 2015

I am very late with this, but I still wanted to write a few words about Akademy 2015.

First of all: It was an awesome conference! Meeting all the great people involved with KDE and seeing who I am working with (as in: face to face, not via email) was awesome. We had some very interesting discussions on a wide variety of topics, and also enjoyed quite some beer together. Particularly important to me was of course talking to Daniel Vrátil who is working on XdgApp, and Aleix Pol of Muon Discover fame.

Also meeting with the other Kubuntu members was awesome – I haven’t seen some of them for about 3 years, and also met many cool people for the first time.

My talk on AppStream/Limba went well, except that I got slightly confused by the timer showing that I had only 2 minutes left, after I had just completed the first half of my talk. It turned out that the timer was wrong 😉

Another really nice aspect was to be able to get an insight into areas where I am usually not involved with, like visual design. It was really interesting to learn about the great work others are doing and to talk to people about their work – and I also managed to scratch an itch in the Systemsettings application, where three categories had shown the same icon. Now Systemsettings looks like it is supposed to be, finally 🙂

The only thing I could maybe complain about was the weather, which was more Scotland/Wales like than Spanish – but that didn’t stop us at all, not even at the social event outside. So I actually don’t complain 😉

We also managed to discuss some new technical stuff, like AppStream for Kubuntu, and plenty of other things that I’ll write about in a separate blog post.

Generally, I got so many new impressions from this year’s Akademy, that I could write a 10-pages long blogpost about it while still having to leave out things.

Kudos to the organizers of this Akademy, you did a fantastic job! I also want to thank the Ubuntu community for funding my trip, and the Kubuntu community for pushing me a little to attend :-).

KDE is a great community with people driving the development of Free Software forward. The diversity of people, projects and ideas in KDE is a pleasure, and I am very happy to be part of this community.