Blogs

I meant to write a post about the upcoming Akademy for a while now. Since I submitted quite a few sessions (obviously requiring preparation) and I had to prepare for the KDE Frameworks BoF, I never quite found the time… until now! I’m all done! Actually I just have to pack my bags and hit the road at that point. It’s probably the first Akademy where I’m ready four days before the first flight of my journey.

Anyway, Paul’s post on what he plans to see inspired me to do something similar. Let’s see how I’ll navigate the tracks during Akademy.

Day 0: KDE e.V. General Assembly

The day before the fun begins for the community at large, the KDE e.V. membership gathers for its annual general assembly. It can be perceived as a day long boring meeting (I know some do), but it’s clearly not like that. It is a very crucial event as KDE e.V. has important responsibilities in order to help the community. For instance such a body is necessary for Akademy itself to exist! It is also represented in the KDE-FreeQt foundation…

Clearly an organization not to be underestimated. This year assembly will be especially exciting as several positions are opening in the Board of Directors, which means elections… and candidates. We have quite a few this year which is a good sign of liveliness.

Day 1: Digital Feudalism, Tech and Community

Obviously I can’t miss Sascha Meinrath’s keynote. I had the opportunity to meet Sascha during FISL 15 earlier this year. He is probably one of the most interesting persons I met during the last couple of years! I discussed with him some of the points he’ll likely touch in his keynote about Digital Feudalism. Definitely something people should attend as it is crucial for the years to come in the Free Software movement.

Then I will obviously attend the fast track session. To me we got a few which clearly stand out like GCompris transition to QtQuick, Everything Qt, A year with Akonadi and Using KF5 in commercial applications. This fast track will conclude my first morning.

The afternoon is then packed with quite a few interesting talks. Since I can’t duplicate myself I won’t be able to attend everything I’d like to… I urge application developers to attend Porting to KDE Frameworks 5 and Porting to QML.

That said… in the tradition of “do as I say not as I do”, I’ll attend something else instead… told you I had to make tough calls! I will run in the room 2 and stay there the whole afternoon.

I’ll first attend War of Idioms by Ivan. The man knows his C++ standards and is definitely enthusiastic about some of the recent changes. So am I! I had the opportunity to use new idioms while working in projects with C++11 support, so I’m looking forward to learn new ones thanks to Ivan.

Then I’ll attend A tale of ELFs and DWARFs by Volker. From the abstract it could sound as something very low level, maybe it is somewhat low level… but that is impacting everything we do when developing native code. Since that’s what we mostly do in our community it’s good for your toolbox to know linking and loading to be able to get out of troubles when needed. Definitely healthy, like eating your veggies at every meal.

After that I’ll switch in community mode, looking forward to the Board of KDE e.V. session. Curious about the KDE e.V.? You know, the organization I mentioned above as crucial. Yes, that’s what I thought: you should attend this session too!

Still in community mode I’ll make sure to pay attention in the KDE in Asia session. I have some kind of fascination for what’s going on there. We got people in those countries doing amazing things and organizing great events. We ought to learn and seek inspiration from them. That talk has quite a few lessons for us doing promo work in Europe I’m sure.

Day 2: Craftsmanship, Usability and Design

This one will be my big day… so obviously I can’t attend everything I’d like again.

At least I will be listening to Cornelius’ keynote. I’m curious about his take on the personal growth experience working in a community like KDE might bring. Like him, I joined for technology but stayed for the community. I also know we have different point of views on the finer details so that will be interesting to have a broader view in a different frame of reference like that.

Then I will be on stage during the fast track session to deliver my KDE Craftsmen talk. As I said, like Cornelius I see personal growth opportunities in the community, but I think we don’t seize them as much as we could. I’ll make the case of why that is and where we could look for inspiration.

Of my fellow fast trackers, I’m especially looking forward to A quick guide how you can save the world or why it is impossible to do usability (what a long title for a short talk!) by Björn Balazs. Another of those skilled people which inspired me in the past, looking forward to what he’s up to.

After lunch, just like on day 1, I will stay in the same room the whole afternoon. Only this time it will be room 1…

First I’ll pay a visit to Andrew Lake’s Community Design and the KDE Visual Design Group. Being stuck in the lower stack so far I didn’t get many opportunities to interact with the people in the Visual Design Group. They did a massive job so far so I’m eager to know more on how they got there!

Next, I’ll stay for The Designer and its habits by Jens Reuterberg and Thomas Pfeiffer. Looks like I couldn’t get enough with only one designer related talk, so let’s go for two! More seriously, I’m convinced that we could do better with truly multidisciplinary teams, and that talk might just show a path to creating those.

After that I would have loved to attend Jonathan Riddell’s talk titled Do you need to be brain damaged to care about desktop Linux?. Unfortunately I’ll have to pass since it will clash with my own talks…

I will give my two sessions almost back to back apparently and that’s perfectly logical. You might not guess it from the title but one is the continuation of the other. In Agile to the Rescue, I’ll explore the reasons why we probably need to take inspiration of what’s going on in the agile community and what we should borrow immediately. In Rebooting Zanshin, I will present the type of results you can obtain by applying the principles devised in the other talk. I will show some code and metrics gathered on the project.

Probably tired of my three talks, I’ll gently end the day by attending David Faure Breaks The Law!? by Paul Adams. I expect this talk to be fun in the great Humongous tradition of the term… don’t be fooled though! The form might be funny, but the man is also among the most knowledgeable people on community dynamics and management I know of. I’m curious about his findings. I also expect him to show ways in which we can improve dramatically.

Day 3: Workshops

I’ll start the morning with my own workshop From QtWidgets Legacy to QtQuick and beyond. It will be two hours long and it will be all about live coding with participants input. Hopefully it should be interesting to many, if we’re convinced about using tests we all have the same problem: but I already got a pile of untested code?? What can I do with that? We’ll see an approach for exactly tackling that problem.

Then I will likely attend Profiling 101. I ended up profiling applications both for KDE projects and for customer projects. Still, Milian is really knowledgeable on the matter, so I’ll see if I can learn some new tricks or improve old ones.

For the last workshop, I’m torn… but I think I will attend Put your code to the test! by Shantanu Tushar. This is so nice to feel less alone at banging the test drums! Also I expect to learn and share on the use of mocks and stubs as my thinking is still evolving on those.

And that’s it?

Of course not! The great value of Akademy is outside the official sessions. Like any good conference, a lot is happening in the hallway and during social events. This unofficial track is where great ideas appear.

Also the rest of the week we will have BoF sessions. I plan to limit myself to only three this year: Frameworks, PIM and French Promo. This way it should free me enough time to make good progress on Zanshin. Lately Akademy has been more meetings than coding for me… This year I want my share of coding!