Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE which was held this year in A Coruña. I was there since July 22 until last Friday July 31 and even these ~10 days were not enough :). The official start was on Friday July 24 with a pre-registration party, where all Akademy attendees could pickup their badges, have some food and mainly drink with people they haven’t seen for a long time or at all. This year organizers also managed to prepare a show for us in form of preparation of Queimada, which is a traditional Galician punch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next two days were dedicated to talks and started with a keynote presented by Matthias Kirschner. I tried to attend those which were interesting for me and I would say that the most interesting talk was presented by Sebastian Kügler, where he introduced a new mobile platform called Plasma Mobile. This is going to be interesting given the Android and iOS domination, but there is definitely some potential.

 

I also have to mention the talk about sandboxed applications presented by my RedHat colleague Daniel Vrátil. Dan explained what is a sandbox, how it works and what are the benefits of using sandboxes.

 

The end of the weekend was, as usual, dedicated to sponsor presentations and Akademy awards. This year the awards were given to the awesome VDG group because without them the Plasma 5 wouldn’t look so great, to Albert Vaca, who is the main KDE connect developer and to Millian Wolff for his work on KDevelop. The last awards were given Scarlett Clark for her work on CI and to Akademy organizers.

Monday started series of BoFs. On Monday I attended only BoF organized by VDG to discuss the UI of the new traffic monitor feature in plasma-nm, which will be in Plasma 5.4.

 

On Tuesday we had Solid BoF for all developers working on hardware support for KDE. Unfortunately only few people showed up and nobody came to complain. This could be because people don’t know what Solid is or, in better case, everything works as it should. We discussed the current state of various Solid projects and mostly went through plasma-nm issues and missing features and Lamarque also decided to pass on his network management maintainership to me :).

In the evening the same day we had a party. The party was on the terrace of one shopping centre near the venue and was perfect until it started to rain. Then we had to move to a smaller place which was not suitable for so many people, but we enjoyed it despite those minor problems. We were eating delicious food, drinking good wine and dancing at the end so the party couldn’t be better :).

 

On Wednesday we had a day trip. Originally we were supposed to have lunch at the Hercules tower and then go to the beach, but the weather forecast was not optimistic so the day trip was changed to go to the Aquarium first and then visit the Hercules tower. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During Thursday and Friday people are leaving so the attendance of BoFs is not that high as in previous days. I went only to KDE connect BoF just to see what’s going on with this interesting project.

And that’s probably all. This year’s Akademy was perfect and I’m really glad I could be there. The city was nice, the weather was almost perfect, people were friendly and organizers did really good job this year. Thank you all and see you next year!!