Akademy Experience

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The ‘K’ factor in all the KDE things can be observed at a greater level as an attendee for the annual meeting - Akademy. This program is truly an amazing experience especially for a newcomer in the KDE community. All the comprehensive and lightning talks during the 2 days of conference and the BoFs, Public training sessions plus the hacking sesssions with dedicated rooms or more precisely ‘spaces’ after the conference offers a lot to absorb in technical terms. The best part of Akademy is the blend of technical, non-technical sessions and the social events.

This year Akademy was organized in Vienna, which was declared to be the most livable city in the world by Economist survey during the ongoing Akademy. Organizers had a lot to cheer about it and we couldn’t agree more. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in this city.! (P.C. : Sanjiban)

City_View

I attended the program from 12th August (sadly missing the talks on day 1 due to institute examinations.!). Day 2 Started with the keynote by Claudia Garad, where she spoke about the various hurdles commonly faced by Wikimedia and KDE. Aditya Mehra gave a talk on MyCroft AI, one interesting and unique application being developed on Plasma. The talk by Lukas on Python and Qml was really enlightening for me as having worked with qml for my Season of KDE project with Kdenlive. The postmarketOS talk by Oliver gave me an insight of the not so contributor friendly Android OS and the ways to get most out of a mobile operating system with this postmarketOS project. In other talk on openSUSE’s different distros, Ludwig shared the pros and cons of currently deployed systems like Tumbleweed, Leap. I presented my Season of KDE work as a lightning talk, again as being unable to present on day 1 in the scheduled slot for GSoC/SoK student presentations.

I really liked the talk by Nate Graham discussing the plan to improve KDE applications reach and focusing on more inclusivity. The session concluded with the traditional Akademy awards recognizing the awesome work done by community members.

Nate's Talk

After this we attended the social event at the Cafe Derwisch. On the way to the venue, I met Neofytos and Jure, two cheerful members of the community. We had great Turkish food and drinks there. I also met the other people from India here.

For the next 2 days, we attended different BoFs, including KDE Distro BoF, KDE-India, GsoC/SoK. The distro BoF covered various OS distributions along with some new in development being area specific and working on KDE integration with these operating systems. In KDE-India BoF we discussed about the decentralized but growing KDE community in India and making the most out of this to involve newcomers into KDE projects and open source. We also discussed regarding the initial steps to be taken to organize conf.kde.in 2019. In GsoC/SoK BoF, we students shared our experiences working on our projects.

The super amazing organizing team had arranged a sightseeing tour for us around the RingStrausse, starting from Karlsplatz station till St. Stephens Cathedral. We also visited other places like Opera House, Parliament, City hall and the guide explained historical significance of these places. (P.C. : Sanjiban)

tour_pics

The next day on 15th August, we went to Kahlenberg as part of the daytrip. We planned to hike up to this place but couldn’t join the Hiking group (opera house exit confusion :p). So we (Me, Amrit, Mahesh and Jonah) hiked on our own. At Cafe Kahlenberg, we enjoyed the beautiful view of the city from top with Danube river and other parts.

Kahlenberg (P.C. : Amrit)

After this, I discussed about Atelier and the usage of 3D printer with Tomaz and Lays in the hacking space. I also attended the workshop on Functional programming through which I got to know about the Isabelle IDE (preferred for Haskell).

The closing picnic was arranged at the bank of Danube and was fun as well, We bid adieu to our KDE friends here and returned to A&O for the last night of the program.

Akademy 2018 was an incredible experience for me with many new friends, lots of great memories and a wonderful feeling of being part of this vibrant KDE community.!