Akademy 2025

Akademy 2025 was hosted in Berlin, and this was my first time attending Akademy in person.

I was very excited both to see Berlin (and put my very shaky German skills to practice), as well as to attend our big yearly event and meet some more cool folks in person.

The trip out was fairly uneventful, if long (~17 hours of bus, planes, and train). The biggest difference compared to travelling to the Plasma sprint is that this time I had some good noise cancelling over-ear headphones -- what a lifesaver! Especially when you end up on a flight across the ocean sandwiched between 2 screaming, jumping, grabbing toddlers. 10/10 can recommend! The headphones, not the toddlers. 😂

As expected when I arrived at my hotel I crashed and slept for 11 hours straight.

I had a good time at the welcome event. I offered to help and spent the evening handing out food and drink tickets to everyone and chatting to a few people -- including an excellent conversation about the merits of QA & testing, which still surprises me not everyone is on board with!

We had a huge amount of talks and BoFs to attend. (Sidenote: "BoF" stands for "Birds of a Feather", and is apparently a more informal/less structured time for talk/discussion/hacking/etc -- I was lost on what these letters meant for a long time before now.)

I don't think I could hope to cover even a fraction of what went on, and indeed because the schedule is structured in such a way that there are multiple things going on at any given time, I had a lot of trouble choosing what to go to -- what if I want to attend them all?! Well, that is kind of what I am doing as I am catching up on the recordings of what I missed after the fact.

I am very happy that the audio and video quality of the recordings appear to be massively improved over last year's! Paired with the auto-generated captions on YouTube it actually makes for an excellent way to consume the talks, and is valuable even for the talks I attended in person since my auditory processing disorder means that I have trouble understanding what people are saying (massively worsened with low volume/echo/noisy environment/etc). If we can figure out the infrastructure to also record the BoFs for next year that would be another great step up for accessibility and allowing a wider audience to participate & benefit. 💙

We had a BoF about the KDE Out-Of-Box-Experience (OOBE), where Neal Gompa and I went through some of the history of the project (a lot, Neal has been championing it forever!) and its current state (nearly ready for early testing and adoption). There were some good questions, and I am consistently gratified to see the interest and excitement there is for the project.

The schedule for Akademy was a lot for me. On a normal day my available energy is already quite limited, and the venue had a few challenges for me such as the only restrooms and the elevator we were using being on the other side of the building, which meant a whole lot of walking & standing to wait on hard floors so I was feeling more fatigued and in pain than usual.

To top that off my anxiety was sky high, and I have no idea how much I was masking but I think I may have ended up seeming like an unapproachable wallflower.. I promise I am very friendly, just extremely anxious and awkward! Despite that I ended up having a bunch of great conversations during the conference with a bunch of people, and it was amazing to get together with so many other Linux / FOSS / KDE nerds. 🤓

Around the end of Tuesday it was becoming apparent that I had caught a cold or something from one of the many sneezes or coughs I had attempted to dodge during this trip, and I missed out on the social activities on Wednesday and the last day of activities of Thursday. I enjoyed watching the progress on Matrix anyway! I am only now just starting to improve (I always struggle to fight off infections like this).

Several people had said they wanted to talk to me at some point, and we didn't get the chance before this cold knocked me out. Wie Schade! It isn't the same, but feel free to reach out to me on Matrix! @merritt:kde.org

It was really awesome to get together in Berlin, to meet so many new great people and to see familiar faces again, to work on so many interesting things together. I wish I had more energy after a long day to do more social stuff, because I loved getting the chance to interact with everyone in a more relaxed and informal way. Maybe we can figure out some more relaxed / quiet / sensory friendly social & food options next time for those of us who struggle with the loud, crowded, and chaotic environments that are often the default for social events.

Thanks Berlin for having us, even if the city is a bit noisy and has a surprising number of smokers, it was very nice to visit! Tschüss!! 😀 💙