Akademy

This was my last day at this year’s Akademy, because the next day I took off back home. This day wasn’t very active, for me, at least. The day trip took place today, so most people were not at the venue, and visiting Berlin. Me, the Kubuntu team and the WikiToLearn team, and a few other people decided to stay behind and hack.

I took the opportunity this day to get an interview from Riccardo IACONELLI, the god father of WikiToLearn, for the Kubuntu Podcast. It was a fun interview, especially since I was alone to take it, so I didn’t have separate devices for video and audio. I managed to borrow a phone from someone and have the video recorded with it, and record the audio with mine.

This morning was very energetic. I woke up and hurried with my morning siesta, so I can get to the venue in time for the KDevelop BoF. Little did I know that Valorie woke up looong before me, and already even had breakfast. Yeah… We eventually got at the venue and we each went to our BoFs.

At the KDevelop BoF we discussed about the future release 5.0.1 and what should go in it, and we also discussed about some bugs and how we should use library models to ease the parsing of STL, Boost and Qt. We also got updated by Kevin about the state of KDevelop on Windows. It seems it’s ready to go, except for a couple of D-bus bugs.

Now this was a full day. QtCon was over and it was time to dive in to Academy. Since they are separate events (taking place at „the same” time), Akademy is held at a different venue. It’s taking place at TU Berlin – MAR Gebäude. We had many class rooms booked for the BoFs.

Again we had a long night, so we were tired in the morning. Soooo…. we were late… again… At least we got to see a few great views in Berlin while we were exploring our way through the city to get to the venue.

Day 4 started with a getting to know each other session with my new room mates. They seemed like nice guys. They are travelers, going around the world, making a living with their art (music and graphics). We exchanged experiences, and gave each other advice on many life related aspects.

Since this was our (me and Phillip) only night in a dorm room, we started packing as soon as we woke up, and went to the reception to switch rooms. After that it was off to the venue with us.

On the second day, I’ve decided to become a volunteer. I thought I know these kind of events, why not give a hand. So I went and registered, got my volunteer T-shirt, and I’ve been assigned a task. My first task was to be video operator in a room. That implies that I have to start/stop the streaming of the talk, make sure the streaming works, move the camera to capture the speaker and/or the slides.

I’ve finished the Docker image for compiling KDevelop 5, first thing, before I even got out of bed. I’ve experimented something with the KDevelop 5 packaging for Kubuntu Xenial, but without much success.

Time to check out of the double room. It’s a dorm room for me and Phillip for the next night. We stored out luggage in the luggage room, and off to the venue we were.

As soon as we got there, we started hacking. I’ve started by fixing my blog’s tags and categories, so I can re-enable the feed for KDE Planet.

Being a huge lover of the KDE community and KDE software, I couldn’t stay away and not participate at Akademy this year as well. This time it’s held in Berlin, and it’s being held together with QtCon. Also participating to QtCon is VideoLAN and FSFE. Amongst the organization was also KDAB.

I’ve booked my trip in advance with a couple of months I think, and I booked a room at a hostel together with Phillip Muskovac (yofel) from Kubuntu. Since the stay was pretty long, it was rather difficult finding a single or double room spanning over so many nights. But we managed to get 5 Kubuntu members under the same roof. Valorie and Scarlett arrived first, then me, the day after, and the next day Phillip and Clive. By the end of the day (1st of September) we were all here.

So, I’ve been to my first Akademy.

I had no idea what to expect, but the experience was unforgettable. I’ve finally had the opportunity to meet face to face a part of the KDE community. I’m sad that not all contributors could come, so we could see ourselfs, just how many we are.