Akademy Day 1

Posted on Jul 4, 2010

Into the sea of existing akademy posts enters another one.

Technically its my second day in Finland. I arrived on the 2nd with Pradeepto from mumbai. We met seele and Justin at Schiphol itself, while blauzahl and Mek were on the same flight! If that wasn’t enough, the bus from Helsinki to Tampere found aseigo and Hans Chen on it too, making it the Akademy bus.

The Student House TOAS city is an awesome place to live in, with rooms just like in college, a bit better :)

The Finlayson area hack room was really cool too, and yesterday I spent a few hours there getting to know quite a few people, including Vishesh Handa. I also bought my KDE shirt. At 8:30, the sun was still high up in the sky, at 11, its like evening in Mumbai which was bizarre. Akarsh and Prakash also caught up after a delayed flight.

Today was even better. The keynote was pretty good, its great to see KDE going deeper into the mobile space. Meanwhile (Qt made sure to give us all a rubber duck)[http://developer.qt.nokia.com/duck].

I met a lot of people who have been mentors, helpers and friends over IRC – Martin Grasslin, Leo Franchi, Nikolaj Nielsen, Friedrich Kossebau, Martin Sandsmark, Lydia Pintscher and many many more, whom I have to talk too about various topics.

Thomas Thym’s talk about principles in open source communities was very interesting while both Nikolaj and Leo conveyed social music capabilities and Amarok’s role in it very well. During the few talks I didn’t attend, I tried to do a bit of work, but it was a little hard due to all the excitement :)

Now Martin had written a plugin for the match, but I couldn’t stand not watching it and missed his talk. I wasn’t alone. It was great fun to travel 9000 km to watch football with other KDE developers. And since KDE has a large number of Germans you can guess who was supported. Germany were amazing with a 4 goal trouncing of Argentina, and with this form they can easily win the Cup.

With all the talks out of the way, me, kstar and pinocchio went to the downstairs supermarket. I had a strawberry-pineapple bread and rajma-chawal for dinner :) followed by liquorice sticks.

The KDE Akademy party was at the Love Hotel on Hameenkatu and it was fun meeting a lot of people and talking non code stuff and enjoying the Spain-Paraguay match. But now I’m really tired and have to crash if I want to be attentive tomorrow, particularly with performance, UX and cloud talks.

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