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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 25, 2023,
updated Aug 05, 2023
> In my previous blog post I mentioned Akademy wasn’t completely over for me, I still had to hold an online training about the KDE Stack even though I left Thessaloniki already.
> I had a few participants. Surprisingly some of them (but not all) were more experienced KDE developers than I expected. Since the training is more meant for people who want to get a feel on how to get around our stack I was a bit anxious they wouldn’t get bored… From the feedback I got immediately after the training it looks like it was well received even by the more experienced people. Apparently everybody learned quite a bit and had fun in the process. I’ll thus call it a success.
> As you may have seen from other posts on https://planet.kde.org, KDE’s annual Akademy conference is over and people are starting to blog about their thoughts on it!
> This is my fifth Akademy, and my third one attending in person. As always, it was great to meet up with colleagues and old friends in real life! A kind of magic happens when a bunch of technically adept people with strong social relationships gather together in a room. There was a lot of it on display this year, even despite the punishing heat and spotty Wi-Fi performance!
> Last week, I went to Akademy, the yearly KDE conference, in Thessaloniki. This is now my third in-person Akademy and fifth Akademy in total. As always, this is the occasion to meet old and new friends, learn about what others are hacking on and enjoy good food.
UPDATE
> Akademy started with two days full of talks on Saturday and Sunday and I have to say sometimes it was hard to choose between the two parallel tracks. Overall it provided a nice mixture between what happens in the community, learning how people solved problems and learning from them (for example Ingo fixing accessibility in Kleopatra) and insight into new technologies (I had never heard of Slint before). Apart from the two standout keynotes about Kdenlive and the Libre Space Foundation I want to highlight Joseph’s talk about Internal Communication at KDE which it turns out also projects outwards for example to new potential contributors. The talk itself was well structured and presented and had engaged with the audience nicely as well.
> This year I did not submit a talk myself but stood in for Albert for an update about what’s happening in the KDE Free Qt Foundation and in the KDE e.V. KDE Free Qt Working Group during the KDE e.V. Working Group reports. since he had a talk at the same time in the other room.
Only indirectly related:
> Some time ago I bought a car. Anyway, it’s all-electric, and also the first car I’ve ever owned in over 35 years of holding a driver’s license. To give this a bit of a KDE spin, after Akademy in Greece I stuck a week of vacation on to it and rented a car. An ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) one, which felt backwards and weird. It is entirely a practical consideration, though.
> From my house in the Netherlands, in a small town of 12 thousand people, there are 7 charger poles (2 spots each) within 300m. Only two are particularly convenient to reach, but there’s always something available. I haven’t even bothered to count the total in town – lots.
Formal report:
> Akademy is KDE's annual event where the community comes together in one place to meet in person, share ideas and hack on common projects.
> This year's Akademy was held in Thessaloniki, Greece and started on July 15th and ran until July 21st. This year 150 people attended Akademy in person, and 220 tuned in online to attend chats and BoFs over video conference.
> The first weekend of Akademy, as is tradition, was dedicated to talks, panels and fireside chats. The sessions, which were streamed live to the whole world, covered a wide variety of KDE-related topics, ranging from the hot topic of the road to Plasma 6, to how to hack off-the-shelf solar panels, and many things in between.
New today:
> A big thank you goes out to the Ubuntu Community for making my attendance to the KDE Akademy 2023! This was a very successful conference for me. I had very positive feedback for my speech on “A million reasons why snaps are important. I also had a productive BoF on snapping KDE applications. Most importantly I got to catch up with many old and new friends and got to put faces to the new. There were so many great talks and BoFs, but one of my favorites was the Goals as all three compliment each other. The keynote was amazing, I had no idea open source has made its way into space! How cool is that!?! Despite the high temperatures ( something I am used to, but not that humidity! ) I had a wonderful time and was able to visit many cool sites in Greece. What an amazing place.
One more report:
> This year, I was finally able to participate in-person at Akademy. Apart from meeting some familiar faces from the Plasma Spring in May this year, I also met lots of new people.
> When waiting for the plane in Frankfurt, a group of KDE people formed. Meaning, we had a get-together even before the Akademy had started ;). On the plane to Thessaloniki, I made a merge requests to fix a Kickoff crash due to a KRunner change. Once that was done, everything was in place for the talks!
> On Saturday, I talked once again with Nico and also Volker about KF6. This included topics like the remaining challenges, the estimated timeline for KF6 and some practical porting advice. I also gave a talk about KRunner. This was the conference talk of mine that I gave alone, meaning I was a bit nervous 😅. The title was “KRunner: Past, Present, and Future” and it focused on porting, new features and future plans for KF6. Thanks to everyone who was listening to the talk, both in person and online!
Late coverage:
> A week ago I returned home from KDE Akademy in Thessaloniki, Greece. If you count online attendance in the recent years this would have been my 20th Akademy, and I had no idea how much I had missed doing this in person for the past four years.
One more:
> This will be a quite short post, as I'm still working on getting my studio back, meaning I don't have a lot of time lately. But yeah: I joined the other devs @ Akademy and I even did a quick talk with Marco regarding what Plasma 6 will bring.
> Before I start talking about the event itself, though, do let me say that I only managed to join in thanks to the KDE eV, who covered part of the traveling and hotel costs. That's extremely helpful, and I hope to get back to productivity and give back to KDE!
> So, how was the event for me? Well, firstly, Thessaloniki had some pretty places:
Very late coverage:
> (German version of this post: https://wordsmith.social/felixernst/akademy-2023)
> 37 °C were the average daily temperature heights during the Akademy week in Thessaloniki. When you walk outside at these temperatures, your first thought is that you would rather go back inside. This used to be a temperature that one would hardly ever see there. 38 °C has not been exceeded in Thessaloniki in the 5 year span 1980 to 1984. But actually we were lucky, because the real heat wave only came around when we already left with around 44 °C in Thessaloniki and forest fires everywhere. It is a shame that with the current global political landscape none of this seems likely to become any better (to put it mildly) within our lifetimes. The nature in Greece is very nice aside from that.
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