Akademy 2019 is over.

Akademy 2019 took place in Milan, IT, at the University of Milano Bicocca from 7th to 13th of September. I arrived on Friday 6th and left Milan on Tuesday 10th.

This year Akademy was a little bit different for me. I joined MBition recently to push Open Source and, giving the kind of activity and technologies we use, KDE is an community we can learn a lot from. We have many things in common.

MBition decided to sponsor the event at the Supporter level and my colleague Julia König came with me for a couple of days to learn more about these kind of events and this community in particular.

We attended to the welcome event, the sponsors dinner and the first days of talks together. During the second day of talks, I introduced the company to the attendees during the sponsors talk.

It was also great to see my former employer, Codethink Ltd, as sponsor once again.

Several of the talks were very interesting although in general I did not attended to many. I spent quite some time outside talking to old friends, some new young contributors and other sponsors.

In terms of talks, the highlight of the event was Lars Knoll, CTO of the The Qt company. The interview published a few days before his talk is worth reading. He presented the most relevant plans about the coming Qt 6.

One of the things that have improved in KDE is our communication with the outer world. And Akademy reports are just an example. Check out the report about the first couple of days (talks).

On Saturday several talks reported about the accomplishments and challenges of the goals the community have been focusing on the last couple of years. The new goals were presented on Sunday, the second days of Akademy.

On Monday 10th, part of the day was invested in the KDE eV General Assembly. Some BoFs also took place that day. You can watch the report published on The Dot.

As mentioned, I came back to Málaga on Tuesday morning but you can read the reports about the Hands on Sessions and discussions tat took place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Last but not least, do not miss the interview with Leonardo Favario, Project Leader at the Italian Digital Transformation Team. It is a good one.

Thank you to the organizers and sponsors as well as the rest of the people who made Akademy a great event, in record time. It would be a great sign for MBition to be able to come back next year.

KDE is looking for a place and a team to host the event next year. If you are interested in gaining some traction locally to your Open Source efforts and are willing to meet a whole bunch of crazy, smart and friendly developers, think about applying to organizase Akademy 2020 (download the brochure).

I would like to finish this article sending my condolences to the family and friends of Guillermo Amaral, now that it has been made public that he passed away, victim of a cancer he fought hard.

Guillermo was a great person. He had magnetism and an unique sense of humor. I cannot say but good things about him. He did great stuff.

Life is not fair.