Akademy 2025
A few weeks ago was KDE’s Akademy which was hosted in Berlin, Germany this year! This was my first time visiting Berlin, which I’m surprised by considering I’ve been visiting Germany practically non-stop since 2023. There was lots of fun this year, and it’s always great seeing everyone again ❤️
Travel
Getting to Berlin for me and back was 100% uneventful, which is odd. (This time, the travel bug bit Nate Graham 😬) So much so, both arriving planes were early! Also because of the location of BER there was literally only one direction to go, so even the train travel was simple. Within the city, it was the S-Bahn all the time and the occasional U-Bahn.
Of course, I kept track of my itinerary is KDE Itinerary this year again. I only had to fix one bug with my United Airlines parser, that’s pretty impressive!
Hotel
Despite booking late, I did manage to snag a week-long reservation at the B&B Berlin-Tiergarten. It was close both to the venue at the TU, the Tiergarten and the Tiergarten S-Bahn station which was super useful. The hotel itself was nice, but ~€12 for cold cuts during breakfast was a bit much (I didn’t realize that were was a bakery close by until after I bought breakfast, whatever…)
This was also my first hotel where instead of a room key, you have to punch in a number on a keypad. Like no, literally one of these kinds of keypads:
The hotel also had a self check-in, very modern I guess. Kai Uwe added support for the keeping the access code in Itinerary already, so the next time I stay at a B&B I’ll use that instead of a photo!
Akademy
As it is every year, it’s a tough choice deciding which talks to attend. Fortunately we only have two tracks and livestreams, so you’re never missing too much but it’s always a choice. Here’s some of my favorites from this year, in bullet-list form! (They’re ordered by how they’re scheduled.)
- Plasma: Lessons Learned and Our Path Forward in 2026 and Beyond, given by David Edmundson.
- Handling Negative Feedback, given by Akseli Lahtinen.
- Getting Hired to Work on FOSS - The Do-s, Don’t-s and Pitfalls for Everyone Involved, given by Till Adam. (OK, he’s one of my bosses. But I still like the message of hiring friends does have a very real social cost involved.)
- Next-Gen Documentation Infrastructure for KDE, given by Nicolas Fella.
I gave a talk about bridging the gap between artists and Wayland, a lot of it being my own personal experience/journey and all that fun stuff. As I feared, there were one too many slides so unfortunately I skipped a few but I hope most it still came across. You can view the recording on PeerTube.
I spent quite a bit of time hacking on NeoChat, since all of the maintainers were in one (not so easily) accessible building. Some of my focus points were reporting content, our Android version and so many bugfixes! I also managed to sneak in a small bugfix for B&B hotels in Itinerary.
There were a lot more non-concrete hacking and discussion happening too, I’m glad to see some progress moving in the Kirigami and Add-ons space! Tokodon has become the testbed for a new way to declaratively create and use actions, which is something Tokodon already does but we wanted create a proper, centralized framework.
So overall, a pretty productive Akademy for the community I think! And not just on a technical level, but there’s a lot of talk about the CWG (Community Working Group) and handling community matters spearheaded by Victoria Fischer. I do just a bit of moderation work on our Discuss site, but it makes me so happy this is becoming a new focus. I think we as a community is already a pretty safe space, but that is absolutely something we should not take for granted especially during these times.
Day Trip
The day trip this year was Berlin! Instead of taking a bus somewhere, we were tasked with walking from the Tiergarten area to the Brandenburg Gate and take pictures. Unfortunately for me, during one morning I walked almost the same path accidentally so a lot of it wasn’t new to me. But it was still an overall fun experience, way more fun than falling asleep on a bus somewhere.
We also visited the Computerspielemuseum which was somewhat cool. I’m of the opinion that once you’ve seen one video game museum, you pretty much seen them all (this applies to anything computer-related in general.) However this one had cool statues, and a Painstation!
Another thing that made me happy is seeing new faces at Akademy, so if you have the means to travel to Europe and are even just interested in KDE - please join us for a weekend! (There is an RSS feed for Akademy news, a mailing list and more to keep track of us.)
I’m also just one guy, I recommend reading other people’s Akademy experiences this year at Planet KDE, they’re all fantastic of course. Now, back to hacking!