Akademy 2013 - A Blast!
Wow…
I’ve been gone for eight days and returned just a few hours ago to Berlin. It doesn’t feel like that. The last days went by in a blur of awesomeness! The reason why I didn’t write a single blog post in between is just that I never had a spare minute for that. I arrived on Thursday and instantly enjoyed the warmth of Spain / the Basque country and had a tasty and cheap Menu del Dia at a local Restaurant with fellow KDABians and other KDE friends. Then just a few hours later the first party started, near the old district of the city - amazing! More and more hackers and helpers arrived, the atmosphere was once again so good. The social aspect of this years Akademy was without comparison in my opinion - seriously: Hats off to the local team, you did an amazing job!
While the social events on the following days have been just as awesome or even awesomer to awesomest - I especially enjoyed the day trip and jumping into the ocean! - the technical side of Akademy delivered just as well: My favorite talks this year where Mirko’s about ThreadWeaver, which we heavily use in KDevelop. His roadmap and polished API looks much better than what we have nowadays and should allow for much nicer code which might even perform better - kudos!
Similarily, I liked Volker’s talk about Expression Templates and Kevin Krammer’s presentation of Declarative Widgets a lot. Both of them are colleagues of mine, so the contents weren’t that new to me - yet hearing it all in a concise and entertaining manner is always worth it. The crowd also seemed to enjoy it. Martin Grässlin’s talk about being the 1% corner case was also highly entertaining and gave a very interesting insight into the problems he tackles day to day.
There have been other, less technical talks, which I also appreciated greatly: Kevin Otten’s visionary roadmap for KDE as a community or Till’s highly entertaining presentation of BlackBerry. Which brings me to the sponsors - many thanks! Without them, this year’s event would surely not have been as good as it was!
Oh boy, I already wrote a lot, yet only covered the first three days… After the AGM and presentations on the week end followed a full week of highly educational BoF’s - both around KDE topics (such as KF5, KDevelop, …) or “plain” Qt during the Qt Contributor Summit. This was my first time attending the QtCS and I definitely want to see more of this! Discussing the future of QtWebKit and learning more about whats cooking in QtCore was certainly worth it. Being in contact to the QtCreator and QML guys also helps from a tooling point of view in general and from a KDevelop pov in particular. Oh and we got a nice BlackBerry Z10 phone - many thanks for that!
The afternoons are mostly a blur - I mostly remember lots of Foosball, Socializing, Drinking, meeting Friends of Old and New, Eating, Partying etc. pp.
Anyhow, I think I need to stop here.
tl;dr; Thank you local KDE team for organizing such an awesome Akademy + QtCS 2013! Thank youSponsors for making this possible!
PS: All of you who attended talks on the weekend: Go and rate them! The speakers will love you and provide you with even better talks next year! Go to either the page for the talks on saturday or the talks on sunday, then pick the sessions you attended and finally hit the “Feedback” link!
PPS: I definitely have to come back to the Basque country, the country side looked beautiful and Bilbao alone is worth the trip! And I didn’t even have time to visit the Guggenheim…
Cheers, see you next year you insane awesome crowd of KDE people!
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Comment by Anonymousер (not verified) (2013-07-20 19:11:00)
Blackberry is a gold sponsor?
i would guess they use some kind of Qt but waht is the tie in with KDE?
Comment by Milian Wolff (2013-07-21 00:35:00)
Their new platform makes extensive use of Qt, its shipped by default. And with KDE becoming more modular in the future, it will probably only be a question of time until we see more KDE applications on Blackberry devices.