Past November 2019 KDE fellows from Latin-America arrived in Salvador – Brazil to attend an one more edition of LaKademy – the Latin American Akademy. That was the 7th edition of the event (or the 8th, if you count Akademy-BR as the first LaKademy) and the second one with Salvador as host city. No problem for me: in fact I would like to move there and live in Salvador for at least a few years. 🙂
My main tasks during the event were in 2 projects: Cantor and Sprat, an “academic paper draft editor”. In addition, I helped with promo tasks like LaKademy website.
In Cantor world my main works were related to organization. I asked the sysadmins to move the repository to Gitlab instance of KDE and created a proper website to Cantor in cantor.kde.org, using the new Jekyll template for KDE projects.
The new website is a great addition to Cantor because we want to communicate more directly to our user community. The website has a proper blog and changelog sections in order to be more easy for the community to follow the news and major changes in the software.
The Gitlab migration allow us to use Gitlab CI as an alternative continuous integration tool to Cantor. I supervised the work developed by Rafael Gomes (and not merged yet) to provide this.
In addition to the work with Cantor, I worked a bit more in Sprat, an editor of papers drafts in English. This software uses katepart to implement the PROMETHEUS English writting methodology, as described in this book., in order to assist students and researchers in general to write papers. During LaKademy I finished the port to Qt5 and I expect to release the project this year.
For the social tasks, I took part in the promo meeting and discuss the future works of KDE in Latin America. Our main decisions were related to organize small, distributed events in the cities, organize KDE presence in FLISoL and Software Freedom Day, and more – but now, in the COVID-19 times, it is not more viable. Other decision was move the KDE Brazil organization from Phabricator to Gitlab.
Beyond the technical work, this LaKademy was an opportunity to meet old and new friends, drink some beers, have lunch with amazing Bahia dishes, and have fun between a commit and other. 🙂
I would like to thank KDE e.V. for supporting LaKademy and Caio and Icaro for having organized it. I am looking forward to attend the next LaKademy as soon as possible! 😉