Well I attended my first Akademy this year and it was really AWESOME.
Wait, what did you just say? I have a typo in my first line/title of my blog post?
No...I really meant Akademy, not Academy. Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE which was held this year in A Coruña, Spain.
No...I really meant Akademy, not Academy. Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE which was held this year in A Coruña, Spain.
I reached Rialta Hotel on 24th at night. So, I missed some kind of Spanish ceremony/tradition but my friend, Pinak has clicked some photographs and it really looked cool.
Next two days were for talks. I attended most of the talks and the one which I found most interesting was Plasma Mobile by Sebastian Kügler. We also had group photo over there. At the end of the second day, Akademy awards were given to VDG group for amazing looks of plasma 5, Millian Wolff for his great work on KDevelop, Albert Vaca for creating awesome application KDE Connect and Akademy Organizers for their work and efforts.
From next day, BoFs were conducted and I attended the ones I was interested in. We also had a BoF session on kdeconnect in which we discussed about keeping single code base and making it cross platform and discussed the problems which we might face in that. More details of that BoF can be found in kdeconnect Mailing Archives. I also shared my idea of creating Synchronization Plugin for kdeconnect which would sync the specific folder across the devices and I already have created it but I'm having problems in testing and debug it out.
Other than that, I worked on Plasma Mediacenter and did some to-do from Bhushan's list like fake media source, plugin infrastructure etc. I was the only one from PMC developers. I wished Bhushan, Shantanu and others could have joined me. I wasn't able to work much because my laptop charger didn't plug into European style socket. So, I always had to borrow it from someone else whenever it was free.
We also had a night party somewhere, I don't remember the name of the place. Everyone had drinks, I only took soft ones ;P . We also had food over there and then dance as well. I interacted with other people there, with whom I didn't get chance earlier to meet because of arriving late night at Rialta on 24th. It was really amazing.
I learnt about the cool architecture of baloo from Vishesh, met awesome/entertaining guy Àlex Fiestas, got to know more about KDE Frameworks from David Faure and much more. I got opportunity to meet other people from KDE India community, talked to people in person with whom I had only conversed online before and made new friends over there :D
I would also like to share some thoughts about my journey to Spain. Spain is very good place and I really enjoyed my whole journey. It was overall very good experience. I went from Madrid Airport to Bus Station via metro and then took bus from there to A Coruña. During return journey from A Coruña to Madrid, I traveled on train. I didn't know Spanish but people were really helpful and Google Translate also helped me a bit. One thing that surprised me in Spain was sunset time. While traveling to A Coruña from Madrid by bus, there was clear sunlight even at 10:00 PM. I checked timezone twice on my phone and then browsed Internet if there are two time zones in this country. I even asked time from one person, sitting near me who knew English, to confirm that my phone was showing correct time. So, Nights are shorter over there. I went to aquarium there and has clicked some photographs over there. I also visited Torre de Hércules but didn't go to top of it as I was feeling damn cold and I didn't want to stand in long queue to get over there. I also have created 180° view near Torre de Hércules. Both, Aquarium and Tower of Hercules, were part of day trip present in Akademy schedule. Weather was really nice in A Coruña. It was the first city where I saw coastline as well as mountains at single place. I had some problem there to find food as I am a vegetarian, um, not exactly. I am actually a Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarian. So, most of the food items which I saw had meat.
I would like to thank José Millán Soto as well as other organizers for organizing such a well planned event. Looking forward to Akademy 2016!
Thanks a lot to KDE e.V. for the sponsorship without which it would not have had possible for me to attend such an awesome summit.
