From August 31th to September 10th I was em Berlin attending two amazing conferences: QtCon and Akademy.
QtCon brought together five communities to host their respective conferences at a same time and place, creating one big and diverse conference. Those communities were Qt, KDAB, KDE (celebrating 20th birthday), VLC and FSFE (both celebrating 15th birthday).
Main conference hall of QtCon at bcc
That diversity of themes was a very interesting characteristic of QtCon. I really appreciated see presentations of Qt and KDAB people, and I was surprised about topics related with VLC community. The strong technical aspects of trends like Qt in mobile, Qt in IoT (including autonomous cars), the future of Qt, Qt + Python, contributing to Qt, and more, called my attention during the conference.
On VLC I was surprised with the size of the community. I never imagined VLC had too much developers. In fact, I never imagined VideoLAN is in fact an umbrella of a lot of projects related with multimedia, like codecs, streaming tools, VLC ports to specific devices (including cars through Android Auto), and more. Yes, I really appreciated to find these persons and watch their presentations.
I was waiting for the VLC 3.0 release during QtCon, but unfortunately it did not happen. Of course the team is improving this new release and when it is finished I will have a VLC to use together with my Chromecast, so, keep this great work coneheads!
FSFE presentations were interesting as well. In Brazil there are several talks about political and philosophical aspects of free software in conferences like FISL and Latinoware. In QtCon, FSFE brought this type of presentation in an “European” style: sometimes the presentations looks like more pragmatically in their approaches. Other FSFE presentations talked about the infrastructure and organizational aspects of the foundation, a nice overview to be compared with others groups like ASL.org in Brazil.
Of course, there were a lot of amazing presentations from our gearheads. I highlight the talks about KDE history, Plasma Desktop latest news, Plasma Mobile status, KF5 on Android, the experience of Minuet in mobile world, among others.
The KDE Store announcement was really interesting and I expect it will bring more attention to the KDE ecosystem when software package bundles
(snap/flat/etc) be available in the store.
Other software called my attention was Peruse, a comic book reader. I expect developers can solve the current problems in order to release a mobile version of Peruse, so this software can reach a broad base of users of these platforms.
After the end of QtCon, Akademy had place in TU Berlin, in a very beautiful and comfortable campus. This phase of the conference was full of technical sessions and discussions, hacking, and fun.
I attended to the Flatpack, Appstream, and Snapcraft BoFs. There were a lot of advanced technical discussions on those themes. Every Akademy I feel very impressed with the advanced level of the technical discussions performed by our hackers in KDE community. Really guys, you rocks!
The Snapcraft BoF was a tutorial about how to use that technology to create crossdistro bundle packages. That was interesting and I would like to test more and give a look in Flatpack in order to select something to create packages for Cantor.
Unfortunately I missed the BoF on Kube. I am very interested in an alternative PIM project for KDE, focused in E-Mail/Contacts/Calendar and more economic in computational resource demand. I am keeping my eyes and expectations on this project.
The others days basically I spent my time working on Cantor and having talk with our worldwide KDE fellows about several topics like KDE Edu, improvements in our Jabber/XMPP infrastructure, KDE 20th years, Plasma in small-size computers (thanks sebas for the Odroid-C1+ device 😉 ) WikiToLearn (could be interesting a way to import/export Cantor worksheets to/from WikiToLearn?), and of course, beers and Germany food.
And what about Berlin? It was my second time in the city, and like the previous one I was excited with the multicultural atmosphere, the food (<3 pork <3) and beers. We were in Kreuzberg, a hipster district in the city, so we could visit some bars and expat restaurants there. The QtCon+Akademy had interesting events as well, like the FSFE celebration in c-base and the Akademy daytrip in Peacock Island.
So, I would like to say thank you for KDE e.V. for funding my attendance in the events, thank you Petra for help us with the hostel, and thank your for all the volunteers for work hard and make this Akademy edition a real celebration of KDE community.
Some Brazilians in QtCon/Akademy 2016: KDHelio, Lamarque, Sandro, João, Aracele, Filipe (me)