I came back from Akademy last week and would love to share my experience with you all 🙂 This year also Akademy was great with lots of fun, shared/gained information, met old  friends and made some new.

Pre-registration

This year, pre-registration was at the shiny new Red Hat office in Brno on 5th September. Most of my friends whom I know and going to attend Akademy were present there. It was very pleasant and happy feeling to meet everyone after an year.

       

The Talks

Akademy was two days of main conference which were on 6th and 7th september.  This year our keynotes speakers were Sascha Meinrath and Cornelius Schumacher .

    

Sascha Meinrath                                                        Cornelius Schumacher

This year there were lot of fast track (10 minutes) talks on different areas around KDE. All of them were quite interesting, some of them are:

•  Bruno Coudoin talked about how and why GCompris moved to QtQuick with the support of KDE. What all challenges project faced while moving from GTK to Qt.
•  Paniel Vrátil talked about his one year journey with Akonadi
•  Martin Gräßlin gave  an overview of current state of Kwin in adding Wayland support and future plans.
•  Kevin Ottens talked about KDE craftsmen where analysis was on the way we handle our software production, how can we make our software even better.
•  Kai Uwe Broulik  talked about current status of  Qt port on Android and iOS. Currently, 3 iOS apps in Apple store and 8 Android apps in Google play since December 2013.

Among all long duration talks, an interesting talk which I attended was A Tale on ELFs and DWARFs by Volker Krause . He explained about:

•  How to understand linker errors which we come across while compiling an application
•  How to debug weird runtime behaviours which may occur while running application
•  Way symbols are mangled for C++ created binaries on different platforms like windows, iOS, linux
•  Tools which can help us to read and understand binaries file like readelf, objdump, nm from binutils on Linux, otool on Mac and Dependency walker on Windows
•  gcc options like -g[0-3] to add level of  debug information into binaries which can be further used to solve program issues using tools like gdb.

Akademy conference ended with sponsors presentation followed by Akademy 2014 awards

   

GCompris talk by Bruno Coudoin                           Akademy awards

Workshops

I loved attending workshop on visual design and QML by Andrew Lake .  I have already seen awesome mockup design which Andrew created for Plasma Media Center. It was fun to be in his workshop and learning the way mockups can be created using QML. You can also try that by following this wiki.

I say “send email” and kmail opens mail compose for me, interesting right? This is what  Peter Grasch did in speech recognition workshop. He showed how easily you can configure rules in simon to make your application voice controlled.

BoFs

BoF is one of the the main part of every Akademy which continues for  5 days after main conference gets over. Anything which needs discussion, help or feedback gets sorted out by scheduling a BoF for that particular topic.

     

Plasma Media Center BoF                                          KDE edu BoF

(Image CC by Sujith Haridasan)                                  (Image CC by Sujith Haridasan)

•  Plasma Media Center BoF:  Every year PMC team schedules a  BoF which helps us to get feedback on how application looks currently, what should be done next to make it more better.  This year we discussed on
  •  Vision of Plasma Media Center which we finalized to “To offer an immersive, rich and easy-to-use media experience crafted by KDE for you”.
  •  We discussed on PMC integration workflow with plasma 5
  •  Repository structure i.e whether to split  PMC into libs and backends as two separate repository or keep it in same repo. Finally, we agreed on keeping into single repository.

•  KDE Edu use in India : This BoF was about FOSS community in Hyderabad, India which  have started to use KDE Edu apps for teaching children in government schools with the help of ThoughtWorks. They are creating an interesting app called Human-atlas which will help children to learn about body parts in interesting way and can take Quiz to test what they already know.

•  KDE India Future Plans: This BoF was to give an overview of  what all KDE events happened in India, what problems organizers faced, what all fruitful results came out of various events. Suggestions on how we can improve to attract more people to attend conference and bringing them to FOSS world.

•  KDE Windows: This BoF was for asking questions and help regarding KDE on windows. I attended this because I was curious to know what all KDE apps work on KDE windows and if Plasma Media Center could be run on windows. It was great to see efforts KDE Windows team have done to compile various KF5 modules. Kudos to them from my side!

Fun!

Being around with KDE  people is always fun. I also find fun in collecting different FOSS related goodies. Oh, yes! This year too I collected some of them from different sponsors booth including Red Hat.

        

Lots of goodies                                                  KDE logo by 3D printer @ Red Hat booth

Akademy day trip is always fun intended. This year we went to see Brno Reservoir. We explored surrounding for sometime and further we went for Ferry ride which was amazing. Through Ferry, we reached to Veveří Castle . After seeing castle, to re-energize we took some rest and light snack/drink. After that we returned back to reservoir via bus and further headed to restaurant for dinner.

    

While writing this blog, I felt like I revisited Akademy. These are awesome moments which will get remembered throughout life. You can find some awesome pictures taken during Akademy here . Thanks to KDE eV for sponsoring my travel and accommodation. Also many thanks to all sponsors and volunteers with the help of which this year also  Akademy was superb.

Cheers!