the tyranny of distance && unstoppable march of time

The 2025 edition of KDE's annual community gathering starts today.  Unforunately circumstances mean i won't be attending BUT i was fortunate enough to attend my first ever Akademy last year.  Indeed, that is one whole year ago but neurodivergent scriptophobia and a incredible ability to procrastinate have kept me from writing about it, until now.

Attending talks and sprints was certainly a blast from the past, not that I had ever attended another tech based conference before.  It certainly brought back memories of campus life in my late teens studing anthropolgy/socialogy.  The real hightlight being able to meet fellow attendees for the time in person, all of whom I had only ever previously chatted to in matrix rooms before.

Over the past year we've continued to provide the community with regular package updates from KDE neon and many aspects of how we release packages has changed but this probably deserves it's own post on the neon blog. Aside from this i've immersed myself in the innards of KDE's sysadmin tooling whilst helping with the roll out of the shiny new ephemeral vm builders that fellow antipode Ben has lovingly crafted.  Will definitely use this new tech as a foundation to help automate not only Snap publishing, but also Flatpak's and appimage's.  After all, in KDE it's all about the apps !!

I'd like to thank everyone in the community who have been so welcoming and supportive, the KDE e.v. for helping me attend last years event and wish all this years attendees a fantastic experience.  Cheers !!