Akademy 2026 (Graz) - 30th Birthday Edition

Last week was a great Akademy in Graz!

Welcome Event​

First up was the welcome event on Friday evening, which took place at a rooftop bar overlooking Jakominiplatz; this was lovely in the evening light, and spectacular at night with parts of the city lit up!

I had fun helping to prepare and hand out lanyards to everyone as they arrived. This was also where Nico introduced many of us to Sturm — young, lightly fermented wine; sweet and flavorful. This became a hit at the welcome event and indeed all of Akademy!

Conference Talks​

Saturday and Sunday saw a deluge of great talks; more than I could possibly cover in a little blog post!

A couple highlights briefly:

I am really happy that Scott Jenson accepted my invite to do a talk at Akademy, and I thought it was very well received! Has also created a fair bit of buzz online. Unfortunately did not manage talk much directly — Akademy is hectic and I lost track of him.. oh well, maybe he'll come again! :)

Tracey Clark gave a great talk about QA and testing.. superhero work! It was great stuff and I hope inspires more people to both submit good bug reports as well as to help with triaging.

Gerald Senarclens de Grancy told us about using KDE software to teach kids about computers, linux, programming, and much more. Really interesting stuff. I expect it makes a huge impact to reach people so young!

Markus Feilner told us the crazy tale of exposing how the Bavarian government tried to make a €1 billion+ contract with Microsoft without any sort of consultation, alternatives, bidding, etc.. wild stuff. I'd like to see such consideration for open source options in Canadian government back home!

Eike Hein told us all about how he's been exploring the great pyramids powered by KDE technology — wow that is so cool! That honestly sounds like a dream come true; it had never even occurred to me people like us were doing such things! I'd really love to hear more details on this. hint hint :D

So many other great talks! Only 2 downsides: I couldn't attend them all and had to catch up on some later (with this year's excellent recordings), and the schedule was so tightly packed that there was often only 5 minutes between talks to run to the bathroom; quite the fast pace when trying to keep hydrated! 😵‍💫

Social event​

So many people! Good times were had, many interesting chats with great people. Although, poor Konqi had a rough time…

BoFs​

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday were the BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions — smaller and more informal talks/hackathons/brainstorming/etc.

Definitely far too much to cover, but we had good sessions with the Penpot folks and have some ideas how to help move things forwards there, we have hope for exciting updates to Bugzilla, we traded and talked about some really cool stickers... and a laundry list of other cool stuff, tons of work happening/planned.

Rocket lab​

We noticed some students working on rockets as we were leaving the venue one day, and they gave a few of us a little tour! So cool! Also, their launch computer runs Linux with KDE. 😎

Day trip​

On Wednesday the KDE folks took a short breather from the hectic schedule to do something fun together — visit a fancy Austrian chocolate factory called Zotter!

They started with a short film explaining some of who they are and how they work, which was shockingly well-produced; it looked and sounded amazing!

I really tried to pace myself because the tour includes apparently 300+ tasting stations, and even so by the end I was a bit sick of chocolate. 🤯 🍫 😵

It was super interesting though and very tasty. I ended up buying a bunch from the gift shop to bring home as souvenirs of course! My favorites were the white chocolates and the ones with coffee; specifically the coffee & dates one is amazing. 😋

After Zotter we all went to enjoy some food and drinks (no chocolate!), and the weather was being perfectly accommodating for us!

After we got back to Graz proper several of us ended up sharing some excellent Fella-brewed liqueur in the hotel lobby, and getting very loud and silly and generally having a fun evening together to wrap up an absolutely lovely day.

Wrap up​

Of course I got sick right at the end of Akademy, and after getting home have slept most of 3 days, feeling quite terrible. I am just grateful getting sick waited until after all the great work and fun day trip, conversations and socializing with lovely people!

This was the Akademy for KDE's 30th birthday, and it was appropriately amazing! Thank you to everyone for being such an amazing community. Extra special thanks to the many people that helped to organize everything and make this happen at all, you did such an fantastic job! 🤩 💙