Akademy 2023 was almost year ago and soon Akademy 2024 is coming. This is probably good time to talk about Akademy 2023. I know it was in way too past but some of those who know me personally/professionally know that last year has been rollar-coaster for me emotionally and did not manage to write about event while recovering from it.

But since this post was sitting in draft from long time, it is finally time to finish and publish it.

Akademy 2023

Akademy 2023 was hosted in beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece at University of Macedonia. Main challenge for me was to get visa, it arrived roughly one week or so before travel date, but in end I made it to event, unlike Akademy 2022, where I was not able to even obtain the appointment to submit visa application.

Talks

There were many talks to attend, since Akademy is multi-track event I had to make hardest decision to skip some talks and watch recording instead later on.

Day 1

Keynote was about open-source space technologies, previously I was following development of FemtoStar closely and it is really interesting to see that satelite technologies is not just limited to giant corporations and governments but communities can be part of it too. So of-course this talk was interesting too.

Mr. Eleftherios Kosmas from Libre Space Foundation provided with great insights on how open-source is changing space explorations.

Take-away from talk is greatly summarized in this slide,

Volker Krause gave talk about measuring energy consumption of software. During Q&A session and also later in BoF session about same topic we had some interesting talk about how we can extend this tooling and measure usage of mobile software like Plasma Mobile.

There was remote talk from Thiago Sueto about documentation goals and techniques for KDE and open-source in general. Some important take-away from talk was to when tech-writer or documentation writer fails.

Marco Martin and Niccolò Venerandi gave nice overview about what to expect from Plasma 6, and almost year later we can already confirm that it was as beautiful as it was advertised!

At end of day, Andreas Cord-Landwehr gave a talk about KDE technologies on embedded platform, this is another topic that is very close to my professional carreer and it was interesting to understand state of things.

Day 2

Day 2 started with keynote from kdenlive developers and their journey of 20 years of development. It was really interesting to hear about their challenges and achievements when developing complex software such as kdenlive.

Aleix Pol talked about the Evolution of KDE’s application ecosystem and our deployment strategy, it was interesting to look at KDE software as a product and not as a just software.

After lunch break, Harald talked about Selenium GUI testing and why it is important to do GUI testing.

After yet another coffee break, there was KDE Wayland fireside chat, again this is one of topic that I work closely in professional capacity also, so I decided to attend it.

Day ended with sponsors presentations and Akademy awards.

BoFs

There were lot of interesting BoFs and again same choice paralysis as talks! But I managed to attend handful of them,

• Measuring software’s energy consumption
• Plasma Mobile BoF
• App Stores
• KDE IM Infrastructure
• Wiki improvements
• Hybrid BoFs at Akademy and how to improve current situation
• KDE embedded

Unfortunately I had travel back on Thursday so I was not able to attend BoF on Thursday or Friday.

Daytrip and social event

As there is tradition at Akademy, team had organized daytrip on Wednesday to Dion and Mount Olympus, and also social event in Klio Floating Bar on Sunday after talks.

It was very fun. I posted some pictures on Mastodon and I don’t want to overload this blog post with pictures, howver one picture which helped me with everything that happened after Akademy I want to post it here!

Akademy 2024

This time Akademy is happening in city of Würzburg, Germany. I just submitted visa application for it on 31st July. If those are approved I am planning to attend Akademy 2024 again in-person and meet my favorite KDE Folks.

My attendence for Akademy 2023 and 2024 are sponsored by KDE e.V.

If you would like to support KDE community, please donate to KDE e.V., both one-time and recurring donation options are available at KDE donations page.