From Fri, Sep 6^th to Tue, Sep 10^th I attended the 2024 edition of KDE Akademy in Würzburg, Germany. I booked a room in a hotel downtown the same place CoLa, a fellow KDE developer, stayed. Since parking is rather expensive in downtown areas, I left the car in front of the university building where the event was about to start on Saturday morning and took the bus into the city to the hotel. We all used the bus in coming days and one would always meet some KDE folks easy to spot wearing their lanyards.

On Friday night the KDE crowd gathered at a pub in the city and it was great to see old friends and also meet new people. At some point, I was talking to Carlos. It turned out that he already made some contributions to KMyMoney. The git log says it was in 2022. While more and more fellow KDE developers joined the place it became louder and louder and conversations were not easy anymore. Too bad that some of us got stranded at different places on their way out to Würzburg and did not make it until Saturday.

Conference

On Saturday, the conference program started with a keynote by Joanna Murzyn who took us on a journey from crucial mineral mining hubs to electronic waste dumpsters, uncovering the intricate connections between code, hardware, open source principles as well as social and environmental justice. We discovered how the KDE community’s work is shaping a more resilient, regenerative future, and explore ways to extend those principles to create positive impact beyond tech world.

On the first day, I took the opportunity to see the following talks

• Current Developments in KDE Hardware Integration
• KDE to Make Wines — Using KDE Software on Enterprise Desktops a Return on Experience
• KWin Effects: The Next Generation
• Adapt or Die: How new Linux packaging approaches affect wider KDE
• An Operating System of Our Own
• What’s a Maintainer anyway?

The last one for the day complemented the keynote in a nice way. In KDE newcomer Nicole Teale’s talk entitled “Getting Them Early: Teaching Pupils About The Environmental Benefits Of FOSS” she presented the work she is doing introducing KDE/FOSS to pupils, with a focus on its environmental benefits. She shared ideas on how to get schools involved in teaching pupils about reusing old hardware with FOSS. and presented some of the projects that have already been implemented in schools in Germany. This project is funded by the Umweltbundesamt (UBA) called “Sustainable Software For Sustainable Hardware”. The goal of this project is to reduce e-waste by promoting the adoption of KDE / Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and raising awareness about the critical role software plays in the long-term, efficient use of hardware.

This becomes important in 2025 when Windows 10 runs out of support and Windows 11 requires new hardware, even though the existing one is still perfectly suited for the requirements of the majority of people. Linux and KDE to the rescue.

Saturday ended with Pizza and beer at the university as the booked beer garden canceled the reservation due to approaching thunderstorms.

On Sunday, I saw the following talks

• Openwashing – How do we handle (and enforce?) OSS policies in products?
• Opt In? Opt Out? Opt Green! KDE Eco’s New Sustainability Initiative
• KDE’s CI and CD infrastructure
• The Road to KDE Neon Core — Gosh! We’re surrounded by Snaps everywhere!

and of course the KDE Akademy award ceremony. In between those talks I had a chance to meet Julius Künzel and take a look at the problems we have in the KMyMoney project with the MacOS CD builds. He spotted a few things but I did not have the time to take care of them yet.

As a tradition, on Sunday is also the gathering to take the group picture. Here’s this years edition:

Birds of a feather sessions

On Monday and Tuesday I went to various BoF’s and took the opportunity to join the git/Gitlab presentation by Natalie Clarius. I learned a few subtleties of Gitlab that I didn’t know before, so it was worth it. In the meantime I talked with a lot of people and did a small bit of hacking (one bug fixed). The BoFs I joined:

• Opt Green / KDE Eco
• Tutorial: Using lager with Qt/QML
• KDE Goals – Streamlined Application Development Experience
• KDE Linux
• CI / CD

Good-bye Akademy 2024 / Thank you volunteers

Tuesday afternoon was the time to wave good-bye to the fellow KDE people and drive back home which I reached without delay (no traffic on the road) after an hour and a half. Hopefully, I will be able to join next time. Next stop will be the auditing of KDE accounting coming up in Berlin in a few weeks.

A big thank you goes out to the numerous volunteers who made this event happen. The team around seaLne just did a marvelous job.

Back from the fun of Akademy in Würzburg we can now get to the important task of testing Plasma 6.2 beta. It’s now in KDE neon testing edition which we build from the Git branches which will be used to make the 6.2 final release in 2.5 weeks time. Grab it now or if you don’t have a machine to install it on you can try the Docker images using the simple command `neondocker -p -e testing`.

This year’s Akademy was a special one for me in many ways.

First of all, instead of me travelling to Akademy it took place in my hometown of Würzburg, Germany. While I did have a hand in organizing it, most of the credit for it goes to Tobias and David. I had a lot of fun introducing people to my area and the concept of drinking wine on a bridge.

Qt Contributor Summit

Right before Akademy there was the Qt Contributor Summit, also in Würzburg (what a coincidence!). It was great to meet old and new Qt faces and talk about topics that are relevant to KDE, like the upcoming migration of KDE API documentation to qdoc.

Akademy Talks

This Akademy I gave two talks: One long one where I looked back at the Qt6/KF6 transition, what went well, what didn’t, and looked towards the future of what’s next for our software platform. Then I also had a lightning talk where I talked about the role of maintainers in open-source projects, why KDE doesn’t have traditional maintainers, and why that’s a good thing.

Besides that there were also a lot of interesting talks from other people, too many to mention right now. Speaking as a member of the program committee we had some tough decisions to make about what to include.

Goals

During the conference we announced the new set of Goals that were recently elected. I’m excited that my own proposal “Streamlined Application Development Experience” got selected and I’m looking forward to working on it with you. Besides that I also want to see how I can help out with the other elected goals: “We care about your input” and “KDE needs you 🫵”.

Akademy Awards

Another way this Akademy was special for me is that I was awarded with an Akademy award for my work on KDE Frameworks and Plasma. It feels great to get recognition for all the work I’ve been doing for the last seven years.

BOFs

During the week we had lots of smaller meetings and workshops (a.k.a BOFs, world’s most terrible acronym). I was leading two of them, one about my newly-elected goal where I was presenting my proposal in more detail, and one about the ongoing work of mine to migrate our API documentation to qdoc. Thanks to our sysadmin Ben we now have a website where the current (still very much WIP) state of the new API documentation page can be seen.

Other Things

What’s great about Akademy isn’t just talks and BOFs, it’s meeting people you only see online all year, talking to them in person, getting your code reviewed while staring on a screen together, chatting over random visions, complaining about things, laughing and enjoying things together, and wrapping up the day with a nice beer in your hand.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s Akademy, wherever that will be. Maybe it will be your place, organizing it is a lot less scary than you’d think ;).

I attended KDE’s Akademy and the Qt Contributor Summit that happened this year. I also completed my personal goal of giving a talk at a conference! These conferences were back-to-back and were located in Würzburg, Germany during the 5th-8th of September.

Travel

I stopped in IAD before flying into FRA, and the journey was fortunately uneventful compared to last year. My IAD->FRA flight was delayed by an hour due to (another plane’s) mechanical issues and the ATC was backed up. When they announced that they were “sequencing” departures, I was surprised to find them actually putting all of the departing planes in a physical line on the runway.

On the IAD->FRA flight, they were having some troubles with the satellite connection and tried restarting the in-flight entertainment. While that probably did not please many of the people enjoying their movies and shows, it did reveal the in-flight entertainment system for United flights were running Android. Boo, that’s no surprise.

The trains I were on weren’t too late and I quickly arrived in Würzburg after a transfer to Frankfurt Central Station. To save some money, I purchased a Deutschland-Ticket which covered most local transportation, including the buses in Würzburg proper. The ticket was only 50€, which if I had paid for the trains separately would mean at least 65€! I didn’t bother calculating how much bus fares would’ve cost. So the D-Ticket was definitely worth it during my stay.

On my returning overseas flight, the plane was half-empty. So I had a row with window seat all to myself, it was pretty sweet! Is this how flying first-class feels?

Hotel

I stayed in Hotel Amberger, close to the central station. It’s a cute little hotel, housed in a building that was clearly repurposed (my guess is some kind of hospital.) The hotel rooms are dead simple, but I didn’t really care. The first few days were really hot and the lack of a central air conditioning was really noticeable. Once the weather cooled off, the room was much more hospitable.

The hotel room had a TV, but mine did not work. No German TV for me this time! There was multiple bus stops near the hotel, so it was very easy to get to the Akademy venue. The QtCS venue was within walkable distance, so I walked there each day.

Qt Contributor Summit

This being my first Qt event, I didn’t really know what to expect. The venue is hosted in this expensive-looking conference center (Congress Centrum Würzburg) near the river. There was catered food, which included lunch and coffee breaks. Dinner was served on the first day. I noticed the wait staff and looked young so I wonder if they were local culinary students.

The talks were a mixed bag of topics, but I still found value going there. Most of the non-Qt people there were either KDE or KDE adjacent, of course. One of the cooler things for me was meeting a bunch of Qt people in person. Of whom I only knew by name, mentioned in e-mails and Gerrit, so on. Lots of people recognized me by my work on qmlformat, so that was neat.

The talk that interested me the most was Vladimir Minenko discussing “QML Next”, plans to use languages other than C++ with QML. Some languages discussed were Swift, and C#. Curiously Rust was absent, which he did duly note. They did mentioned they were hiring a developer to work on Rust support later this year. The talk itself the concept was a bit vague, but that’s because they’re still in the exploratory stage.

If you’re interested in the other talks in this conference, there are notes and slides available from the Qt Wiki.

Akademy

Akademy was hosted in Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, which was much farther than the venue for QtCS. That necessitated travel by bus, but that was also covered by the D-Ticket. The talks were hosted in two identical-looking lecture halls. On a bus heading towards Akademy one day, I noticed one of the screens didn’t work. Of course, I had to take a picture…

My talk was about integrating C++, Qt, Rust (and KDE Frameworks.) For proper disclosure, this talk is on behalf of my company for spreading the word of our cxx-qt library which eases integration of all of these technologies. I think was a bit too rough structurally but lots of people seem to enjoy it. One of my goals was to raise awareness of the usage of Rust you can find in KDE today, and that seemed to be successful! I want to express my gratitude to my fellow colleague Leon Matthes for helping review my slides. Also thanks to Darshan Phaldesai for his KDE work featured in the presentation.

The results of my talk I think were really cool! Within the KDE community, there seems to be some interest in picking up Rust. Lots of KDE developers were in varying stages of Rust interest. No one told me how stupid it was to glue the two together, so the general vibe I think is “it’s pretty neat, let’s see how well this works.” Unfortunately due to technical issues my talk was not recorded properly. A colleague recorded my talk on his phone, and will hand that over to the Akademy organizers soon.

The talk is now available on PeerTube. The slides are also available online.

Oh yeah, and the KDE goal I’m championing “We care about your Input” was selected! I’m pretty excited to keep hacking away on graphics tablets in KDE Plasma. Thanks to NLnet for sponsoring us to work on that, along with Wayland accessibility improvements.

One of my favorite talks was Xaver Hugl’s “What even is color?”. The work he’s doing in KWin is excellent, and I think he did a really great breakdown to understand what color management is.

Day Trip

In the day trip we went to Rothenburg. It was rainy, cold and miserable most of the day but we still had fun. One of my favorite parts was climbing up the tower to get an excellent view of the town.

That’s all I have to say about Akademy + QtCS, I had lots of fun this year! I’m happy that I was able to attend the talks this year, and meet a lot of people I missed last year. I hope everyone else were able to return home, and I’m excited to see what event I’ll attend next. See you!

Akademy is this yearly thing where bunch of KDE people go to talk about and work on KDE software. I had never been in one before, but this year I managed to make it there! This year Akademy was held at the city of Würzburg. This was also my first time in Germany, which is the furthest I've ever been from home.

I also had my wife Jenny with me, since if I had gone alone I would have gotten lost in some random mountain somewhere, or started a new life at the dark corners of Frankfurt airport, completely confused.

Friday, the day of flying (or so I thought)

On Friday the 6th, we left from Oulu to Helsinki first. Hop on plane at 14.30 and- Oh, a small delay.

Eh, it's fine, we hopped on the plane at 16.00 and-...

The flight was canceled.

So, we wait til like 19.30 or something to get to Helsinki. But of course, our flight from Helsinki to Germany had already left! No worries though, the next flight to Germany would leave soon.

Wait, what do you mean it leaves at 7.00?

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhggggggggggg....

Well, we got paid airport hotel room with paid dinner and breakfast. So we slept at Helsinki the first night. We were supposed to be at Würzburg at 23.55 or something, but of course not. Oh well, with some effort I might be able to make to the event, although I would miss the first few talks.

I had the most saddest (but still good) slab of lasagne at very sad and empty airport hotel restaurant. Very frustrated by everything. Sure it'll get better, right?

Saturday, the day of sleep deprivation

This time the airplane actually started to fly, instead of getting canceled for scandalous airplane activities, and we were on route to Frankfurt pretty soon. I spent some time in the airplane just working on my never-ending game project.

At Frankfurt, we got our luggage and went to the funny ICE train, which was a bit late. Apparently being late is some German train thing, I don't really understand it, but we have similar thing at Finland so it wasn't that shocking.

At the train, we were exhausted with our 4h of sleep due to stress not allowing us to sleep, so we just find some seats and sit down. Five minutes later some chap tells us to go away, so we stay up standing for the next 1h 30min next to the exit doors in some midcabin thing.

I wanted to watch some of the Akademy streams at this point, but I was mostly focusing on staying up.

Eventually, we finally reach the Burg of Würz. First impressions were that it looks really nice and.. What the hell is that? A.. mountain? Wow, they can be THAT tall??? (Authors note: Finland is very, VERY flat).

Also it was hellishly hot. The most I saw was 32 celsius. It was painful, I was sweating all the time and it was not fun.

We walk to our hotel room at Mercure hotel, which was really nice by the way. At this time, Akademy was having an incredible luncheon together, so me and Jenny decided to find something to eat. We found this place that was all about avocados, and I had something called powerbowl, which was brilliant.

After that, we began to study the incredibly complex thing that is the German bus system and started our trip towards the Akademy venue.

Aktually at Akademy

Me and my blurry sleep deprived brain walk to the venue and first off I meet familiar people. A lot of familiar people. Many hugs and "Oh you finally made it!"-s were shared. Jenny was with me there as well and it was fun to introduce her to my friends.

I honestly don't remember much about the day. It was quite a blur. But it was cool and I talked a lot.

I stole a lot of stickers and listened some talks, which I can barely remember... But I do remember which ones:

• Arjen's talk about Union KDE styling theme thing, that is super cool.
• Harald talked about of our own new possible shiny OS called KDE OS. Or 🍌 OS. I found this really exciting.
• A lot of lighting talks, where Nicole's talk about teaching lil kiddos how to install Linux with KDE software on old PC's to bring them back alive.
  • I think this talk was my favorite. It was very wholesome, motivating and I'd like to have similar kind of teaching event at home. No promises, but.. Maybe!

During this day I also began to give out salmiakki to people, since I had been well prepared. It was kinda fun to see peoples reactions, especially if they had never heard of it before.

Then it was back to sleep at the hotel.

Sunday, I managed to do things

On sunday I was at Akademy pretty much the whole day. Again, I listened bunch of talks, met more people and we had many good chats about LTS distros, KDE PIM, Kwin, Flatpak... And many other things I can't remember.

I listened Carl's KDE Apps Initiative talk which was very motivating for me, since I've wanted to make a KDE app for a while. A gaming related lil thing.

After the fun group photo and delicious lunch, I chatted more and wandered about the venue.

There was a talk about daily driving Plasma Mobile and I found it very cool, and we had a chat about the Plasma Mobile afterwards. Apparently my Fairphone 5 could run PostmarketOS with Plasma Mobile pretty well already, but I am not yet ready to commit to such a change with my mobile device.

Last I listened Xaver's talk about what color is in computers. I learned that sRGB is a lie and gasped audibly, then heard a lot of words related to color systems I didn't really always understand.. But I found the talk still quite interesting and informative.

The evening was then again a bit of a blur, with sponsors lightning talks and Akademy Awards (congrats to winners btw).

Very interesting day, but I've always been bad when it comes to learning from listening. I learn by doing.

Of course the day wasn't complete without me going to wait bus with my t-shirt and shorts (since it was hot again), and it started pouring like heck. I was soaked when I got to the bus, then at the last stop I had to walk 1km to the hotel in the rain. Ah well, it was warm so I didn't mind too much.

Monday, I skipped the class

On monday I was so exhausted by Everything:tm: I decided to just chill with my wife and we went around Würzburg, buying food and chocolate.

I spent that day just recharging my social batteries. And I ate some Flammenkuchen, which was delicious!

At some point when Jenny is done editing and uploading her video, I will make separate post for it. Then you can see what Würzburg is like, and hear what she did during the trip.

Edit: Am lazy but heres the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05qexeiHNeY

Tuesday, I flocked together with the birds

Like on monday, on tuesday as well Akademy had these events called "BoFs" which is abbreviation of Birds of a Feather. Because "Birds of a Feather Flock Together". I don't know why it's called that, but anyhow, I participated a few of them:

• New design system bof
  • Very interesting discussions and ideas even I know nothing about design
  • I was mostly hoping to help people there with my programmer side of knowhow, as someone who has touched the Breeze styles codebases
• Tiling in kwin bof
  • We mulled over what we could do to make tiling in kwin even better
  • I have this mini task for myself where I try to make tiles split automatically when a window is dragged on top of the other
• Fedora KDE bof
  • I was just mostly curious whats up with Fedora KDE at the moment
  • I also wanted to give my praise for Fedora KDE, it's been my daily driver for many months now and it's been really good
  • Couple of my friends use it too due to my recommendation and they're having good time gaming on it! :)

To wrap up the evening, I had a fancy dinner with my friends. What was quite a culture shock to me was that after 22.00 the streets were practically completely empty. It was eerily quiet. At home we would have had few drunks about making noise, but at Germany there was just.. Silence.

Wednesday, to home again

Due to having two lizards and them needing a petsitter, and said petsitter not being able to be there the whole week, we left a bit early so we missed the daytrip and the last bof day.

Bit early being our flight from Frankfurt was leaving around 7.00. So we woke up at 5.00.

And when I wake up I saw a message in my phone saying: "Hi your flight is canceled"

Ah. Fun. If all had gone to plan, we would've been at home around 17.00. But instead, we were home at ~2.00.

We had to live at Frankfurt airport for ~7 hours, saw a lot of police with weapons (it was really scary to me, I've never seen weaponry like.. that openly), there was some suspicious luggage that got a whole McDonalds covered in "dont go here" tape and more police.

Urghgfhklfg. Scary.

Eventually we luckily made it to Helsinki and then back to Oulu and I didn't need to type out this blogpost from some corner of the airport.

Conclusions

Akademy was really fun event. I can hardly describe how fun it was. It's been quite a blur due to traveling issues and thus me being completely stressed and exhausted, but I still had many fun chats with everyone.

It was really nice to finally see who the people behind the internet names are and have talks with them, be it just random topics or KDE topics. I met people who I had never met before and shared many chats, laughs and information with them.

I learned quite a lot about what's going on in our KDE ecosystem and even outside of it, how we all interact. But I think the biggest thing I learned was that events like Akademy are crucial for the motivation and wellbeing of the KDE community. It helps us stay together, keep our bonds strong, be it KDE folk itself or people working with us, and keep us being awesome at what we do: Making computers do cool things, for free, for productivity and for fun.

Sorry about no photos, I have basically nothing: I am very bad at taking photos because I simply don't remember.

I love KDE and if you love KDE too, and if it's at all possible, visiting Akademy is well worth it!

See you at the next one, and apologies for the all-over-the-place-rambly-travel-post. Hope you find it a good read anyway.

Thanks for reading!

This year I went to Würzburg, which is a nice small German city famous for its wine. But I didn’t only go there for the wine, but also to attend Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy.

Qt Contributor Summit

The travel to Würzburg didn’t go as planned as Deutsch Bahn had some technical issues with their train and couldn’t reboot our train. We still managed to get in Würzburg on time and even had the change to get a small touristic tour from some locals.

The event itself was great and was the first time I attended fully a Qt Contributor Summit. Last year, I only attended a few session since the event was 20 min away from home.

There was many breakout rooms focused on some spcial topics, for me the most interesting sessions were about Qt for Python, how to hate QML, qt-project.org, Vector Graphics in Qt.

It was great to see how the KDE community still plays a big role in Qt and the Qt developers really appreciated what KDE finally moved to Qt6. They reported that the flow of contributors and bug reports increased.

Qt Chief Maintainer Volker Hilsheimer even stressed out how important it was for some of their customers to see KDE ported to Qt6, as it shows what Qt6 is stable and mature enough. Qt6 is indeed a hugo improvement over Qt5 and I am very happy how good the transition was.

I think it was a great idea to have Qt Contributor Summit just before Akademy. This allowed to have many KDE Contributor to the Qt Contributor Summit and many Qt developers to Akademy. It would be great next year to do the same next if possible and encourage more people from the Open Source Qt ecosystem to join too.

Akademy

Once the Qt Contributor Summit ended, we started a few hours later with the Akademy welcome event for some KDE beers. But before that, I had some bubble tea and spent some time with some friends exploring the city.

The weekend was full with a lot of great presentations. I presented a small report about the Accessibility Goal and the Fundraising working group. I also gave a bigger talk about the KDE Application Ecosystem, which I am really passionate about. The whole slides ware made with Calligra.

I was also very happy to see the new elected goals.

Sunday was also my birthday, thanks to everyone for congratulating me. I also received a super fancy special birthday sticker and some amazing cake.

Day Trip

We had our yearly day trip too, this time at Rothenburg ob der Tauber. A charming small town in south Germany.

BoFs

The next few days were filled with BoFs and many informal discussions. During the Promo BoF, we decided to create a “This Week in KDE Apps” blog posts. Paul volunteered Tobias, Joshua, and me as the initial team for this.

I also hosted a BoF about a future replacement of KWallet. There were some discussions about the scope of this effort. Should we just focus on storing OAuth2 tokens as a background service what the normal users should never interact with or do a full-blow password manager like macOS Keychain. I presented my work toward the latter around based on KeePassXC and the KeePass format (see my old blogpost) as it would allow to use a standardized file format that also work on other platforms. The KeePassXC developers are working on providing a reusable library, so we don’t need to fork their code. There will likely be more discussion about this in a separate gitlab issue. The lack of a good story around passwords is not unique to KDE but to the whole Linux ecosystem. If you have some opinions about this, feel free to reach out.

I discussed with Ben, Lydia and Aniqua the infrastructure for newsletters for our supporting members. Ben managed to get an instance of Listmonk in a matter of minutes and this seems to be the right way for us to manage a newsletters or at least way better than using a mailing list for this.

Kieryn hosted the best BoF: the Sticker BoF where we shared stickers and had a competition to see who had the best decorated laptop. I won!!! and received another special sticker. Thanks Kieryn for organizing this BoF and generally making Akademy this year such an awesome event!

I also ended up finishing a lot of work. I finally ported the last Drupal 7 website to Hugo: dot.kde.org which was a quite massive website with more than 20 years of history. I migrated the Hugo version used by KDE from 0.110.0 (which was more than a year old) to 0.134.0 and I am happy to report that the Hugo folks care a lot about stability and there was only some very small breaking changes. If you are working on some KDE websites, don’t forget to download the latest version of Hugo and to run the following command to update the KDE Hugo theme.

hugo mod get invent.kde.org/websites/hugo-kde@master

With Volker, we finally merged the status bar integration for Android apps so that KDE apps running on Android and now use breeze colors in their status bar, which looks much more integrated and like on Plasma Mobile.

I also got some improvements ideas during Akademy, and I already started implementing some of them: https://invent.kde.org/pim/itinerary/-/merge_requests/324

Finally I started rewritting the Calligra launcher to Kirigami based on the old Gemini UI. Still a bit far away from a being in a mergable state but it already looks quite good.

Conclusion

This was a great Akademy again. Thanks a lot for all the organizers for all their work. I hope to see some KDE contributors again soon at the Nextcloud Conference and Matrix Summit both in Berlin this month. And to the Linux Days in Dornbirn.

If you're using Plasma/KWin 6 i suggest you disable the Morphing Popups effect, it has been removed for Plasma 6.2 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/d6360cc4ce4e0d85862a4bb077b8b3dc55cd74a7 and on X11 at least it causes severe redraw issues with tooltips in Okular (and i would guess elsewhere).

“Heather, Heather, Heather; what did you do now!” and both me & Fenris started laughing with Till, as we’re discussing about the thunderbird snap during the conference dinner.

Yup, this is from UbuCon Asia, my

• First conference
• First flight journey
• First travel out of my state
• First solo travel out of my state
• First solo stay at a hotel

Huhhh, a lot of first timers! I can’t think actually where to start with… I met so many people out there, got so many mentors! Thanks Till , for introducing me with so many mentors! I met Guruprasad sir (the launchpad guru 😄), Kierthana mam and Dimple didi (both are the documentation gurus). A lot of suggestions, tips, guides from them! Thanks a lot 🥹! BTW, How can I forget my OG Bhavani bhaiyaa!

Akademy 2024 in Würzburg - it was a blast

My second Akademy and has ended just yesterday. It was an amazing and productive time again! Apart from familiar faces I know from last year’s Akademy or the Plasma sprint last year in Augsburg, I met plenty of new faces. Some of which I of course had contact in KDE before, but only in the digital world.

One of the best parts was again the day trip with the KDE Community. While it was a bit rainy, we for sure made the best of it and saw the beautiful city of “Rothenburg ob der Tauber”. The view from the town hall tower was very beautiful:

The talks were also quite interesting and highlighted how many facades the KDE Community has. Apart from the lightning talks being great again, the “QML in Qt6” talk was quite valuable, because I did not manage to follow up closely on the latest improvements.
The talks and BOFs related to the KDE goals were also quite beneficial in getting a good impression in what direction we want to go.

Since we had so many interesting talks, it was not possible to join all of them. What I will follow up on later are the talks “Pythonizing Qt” and “C++, Rust and Qt: Easier than you think”.

Albert Astals Cid and I gave a lightning talk together about JSON linting (my part) and QML linting (his part). We were only able to touch the surface in the given time, but had some productive discussions and follow-up questions afterward. I will create a post about the JSON validation/JSON schema topic in the future, since I am still working on some aspects of this.

It has been great again to also do some hacking together and discuss ideas in-person. I will miss being able to say “Let’s discuss this at Akademy?” on merge requests ;).
I did quite a bit of hacking on KRunner, linting/formatting related tooling and also Clazy.
This can also be seen on my GitLab history that has turned a bit more blue and thus active:

What was a great improvement over the last Akademy were the chicken noises to make sure people stay within the time of their talk! To better improve on that, we should maybe get some real chicken next year 🥚🐣🐔. The talks on how to apply for funding in KDE might contain useful info when working towards this ;) PS: My life-long profile picture on GitHub/GitLab is of the super cute chicken I had 🥰.

I reverted my name back to Jonathan Riddell and have now made a new uid for my PGP key, you can get the updated one on keyserver.ubuntu.com or my contact page or my Launchpad page.

Here’s some pics from Akademy