Akademy 2017

This year I attended my first ever conference, Akademy, the annual world summit of KDE.

(You can find people by name here)

I presented a talk on Ruqola [link to the video] and was amazed to see the reaction and support I (and Ruqola) received.

I have been working on Ruqola since February this year and later as my Google Summer Of Code 2017 project. You can read my final status report here.

Akademy started on quite an adventurous note for me. My luggage was delayed at Madrid Airport (and later at my final destination to Almeria). On my way to Civitas (the place where most of us were staying), I met a group of people going to Civitas as well. So we got lost together and found the destination together.

At the warm up party the same evening, I met a lot of people and spent most of my time with Timothee Giet and Jure Repinc (such cute and funny people).

Next morning I got a call from the airport that they’ve got my luggage (yayyy :D)

Edit 1: On the first day I missed my bus (that took all of us to the university daily), thanks to my lovely girl, Anu Mittal, who got down and waited for me so I wouldn’t get lost on the first day 😀 So there was Ismael (from the organizing team), me, Anu and Teodor Mircea Ionita (Who also missed the bus :p ) and we came in a cab. (Thank you Ismael and Anu 😀 )

When I reached Universidad de Almeria, I was Stunned to see the view.

The day started with some amazing talks including Tales of Unicorns and Cake (by Robert Kaye, the Keynote speaker), Plasma (by Sebastian Kügler), Developing for our users (by Aleix Pol Gonzalez), Clazy (by Albert Astals Cid), Kirigami (by Marco Martin) and many more 😀

Aditya Mehra‘s talk on the Mycroft plasmoid was the highlight of the day for me. The topic, after all, was intrinsically interesting — issuing voice commands to an AI assistant on your desktop that appeals to everybody.

After listening to such amazing talks during the day, it was my turn by the evening. You can have a look at my talk here.

Before my talk I was sitting beside Davide Faure (not knowing each other). After I came back to my seat, Davide had already built Ruqola on his laptop and was using it (Yes, wow). He gave me feedbacks on a lot of things and set up a bug list which I could refer to for improvisation.

Then Tomaz Canabrava helped importing Ruqola from qmake to cmake.

Then Marco Martin, maintainer of kirigami, helped set up kirigami for Ruqola’s UI.

Gerry Boland tried his best to fix my ubuntu (and I really really appreciate his effort) but couldn’t get hand of the weird things going on in my system 😀 . At the end, I rebooted with KDE Neon User Edition with the help of Jonathan Riddell.

(You see how many people helped me out.. such is the entire KDE community ❤ )

The second day had equally awesome talks including The KDE Community and its Ecosystem (by Antonio Larrosa Jimenez, the keynote speaker), Input Methods in Plasma 5 (by Eike Hein), KDE neon Docker Images (by Jonathan Riddell).

Also, Baltasar Ortega (from KDE Blog) took my interview regarding  GSoC and Ruqola.

Edit2 : We also had 2 really really cute kids who were called the “rubic kids” as they could solve a rubic cube in like a few seconds, I guess even without looking! (I know right! It still takes me around 2-3 hours to solve a rubic cube :p ) And the entire time they were present there, they were just learning new techniques about how to improve. Amazing kids.

Then we had a beach party thrown by Jonathan Riddell 😀

Edit 3: The next morning I was again late (Ugh, I know :p ) so Aleix Pol offered us a lift along with Baltasar in his car. Thank you so much! 😀

From that day on started workshops and BoFs. I attended Anu Mittal’s workshop on Qt Quick Controls 2, followed by Paul Brown’s (this guy is next level 😀 ) workshop on Increasing your audience’s appreciation for your project highlighted how we should present our product to the users.

I also met Lukas Hetzenecker, the only other current GSoC student present there and who is also the organizer of next year’s Akademy!

It was a pleasure to meet Valorie (she’s lovely!) , Aleix Pol, Baltasar, Anu Mittal, Boudhgyan Gupta, Arnav Dhamija, John Samuel, Gabrielle Ponzo, Sebastian Kügler, Dominik Haumann, Thomas Pfeiffer, Frederik Gladhorn and so many more people whom I don’t remember by name but by face 😀

It was my first Akademy, first conference, first GSoC and it couldn’t have been any better! Though I (and a lot of other people) missed Riccardo Iaconelli at this year’s akademy but I hope to meet him in person soon. A big hug to the entire Akademy team for organizing everything so nicely. And another big hug to all the people I met in Almeria 🙂