Category: talks (Page 1 of 2)

Developing KDE as Products

12 October 2020 / apol / 0 Comments

One thing that is special about KDE software is how it can mean different things depending on your perspective. This is very powerful from a technical perspective, but can make our work harder when we want to convey what our piece of software does and how it will affect its users’ life. How do we optimize our product development towards user acquisition and support?

At Akademy, I discussed shedding some light on the blurry lines that sometimes define our products, and did so based around the Marketing-Mix I was taught at university (so no, I’m not an expert!). I presented it first at a talk, then we had a subsequent BoF session to discuss it and see how it mapped to some projects (we did Plasma and Okular, as a test) to get acquainted with the concept.

What will evolving this process look like? For starters, having some people more knowledgeable on the topic involved. Some already told me they are interested in helping. Big thanks 😊. And then, let’s get our hands dirty.

Maybe more hands-on for each product? I can see ourselves sitting down and discussing how the status quo contrasts with the picture the Marketing Mix would suggest for our products. I have done it for some, and I have the feeling that there is a lot of unexplored potential.

Is your work available on the places you would like it available? Is the product you have in mind the same you’re promoting?

Now are you interested in helping with this process? Would you like to see how we can polish the product you are maintaining? Is there a product in KDE that you think could use this kind of help? Comment down below or send me an e-mail at aleixpol@kde.org and I’ll see to finding some time to sit down and working on it.

Join the Linux App Summit in Barcelona!

6 September 2019 / apol / 1 Comment

As many of you will know we, at KDE and together with GNOME, are organising the Linux App Summit (LAS for short). It will be in Barcelona between the 12th and 15th November.

For those of you who haven’t heard of LAS:

The Linux App Summit is designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.

Participate!

If you would like to talk about what you have been working on, you still can send us your talk. We extended our call for papers to the next week-end. You can learn more about it here: https://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/

Come!

Registration is now open, and it’s open to everyone! Meet leading experts in Linux and have interesting discussions about the future together.

You can register here: https://events.linuxappsummit.org/

Discovering South America – Qt Con Brazil

13 September 2017 / apol / 0 Comments

Few weeks ago I attended QtCon Brasil, an event organised by Brazilian members in the KDE Community who wanted to have an outreach event to the local technology community about Qt and beyond. It was great.

It’s always refreshing to get out of your own circles to meet new people and hear what they are up to. For me, it was more notable than ever! Different culture, different people, different backgrounds, different hemisphere!

We had a variety of presentations. From the mandatory KDE Frameworks talk by Filipe:

Some PyQt experience by Eliakin

And a lot more, although I didn’t understand everything, given my limited knowledge of the language consists of mapping it to Spanish or Catalan.

We got to hear about many projects in the region doing really cool stuff with Qt. From drug research and development to Point of Sale devices.
Us in the Free Software world, we are not always exposed to a good deal of development happening right before us, with the same technologies. It is fundamental to keep having such events where we learn how people create software, even if it’s on close environments.

Myself, I got to present Kirigami. It’s a very important project for KDE and I was happy to introduce it to the audience. My impression is that the presentation was well received, I believe that such wider community sees the value in convergence and portability like we do. Starting to deliver applications useful in a variety of scenarios will bring new light to how we use our computing systems.

Here you can find my slides and the examples I used.

Akademy-es 2016 in Madrid

16 March 2016 / apol / 2 Comments

Akademy-es 2016 will be taking place during the next 15th to 17th of April. Here you can learn about the conference’s program.

Akademy-es is the annual meeting for KDE contributors and users in Spain, which is organized every year since 2006.

During the conference, there will be talks, workshops and other activities where we can:

Get in touch with KDE and Free Software developers and users from around Spain and discuss the projects and trends that are being developed as well as sharing code, experiences and knowledge.
Showcase the KDE Community to people with a non-technical profile, showing the different opportunities it offers.
Discuss the new technologies KDE and Free Software offers, both for new developers and for users who want to know what’s really available to them.
Enjoy learning more about Free Software.

Join us!

Antonio and St Ignucius

Hacking Free Software, a different point of view

20 January 2015 / apol / 6 Comments

I joined KDE to hack. I wanted to create new thriving technologies for the world, to create tools, to learn, and, in general, to add some pragmatics into my perception of technology.

The one thing I didn’t really expect to do is all the rest.

I starting actively contributing to KDE in 2007 and I started contributing to both KDE Edu and KDevelop almost at the same time, I’ve talked largely about this aspect already so I won’t expand. I want to explain the rest.

The Community

My first Akademy, in Glasgow. felt spectacular to me, I made good friends and I remember having very deep experiences. With Albert, Anne-Marie, Rafael, Alexander, I loved the feeling that working together we could do great things and also that I could learn a lot over here. Those who know me know that despite being quite an introvert I tend to start talking a lot when I get engaged, and I remember talking a lot over there.

Foreign country, people, language, nothing mattered, the only important thing was to learn and to hack. I remember partying lots and hacking lots just as well over there. I’m explaining this because there needs to be an explanation, why someone who just wanted to hack ended up founding KDE Spain or joining the KDE eV board?

KDE Spain

Later in 2007 we organized the Akademy-es in Zaragoza. Different setting, different people and different perspective. There you did’t talk to people who want to work with you, they wanted to be convinced about KDE, about Free Softwre. I enjoyed it, it was healthy to put in perspective everything I was doing. Thinking about how to motivate others helps a lot to redirect oneself, to keep with the feet on the ground.

Later on, we decided to start KDE Spain, which was basically the intention to keep doing that in the future. Reaching out to local people, those who you won’t find on our mailing lists, at least not before you get there. KDE Spain has been to the day one of the projects I’ve invested myself the most.

KDE eV

I joined the KDE eV late in 2008. I was by then convinced that without infrastructure all good to be done in the project is in vain. We’ve all had this feeling when you see another project offering something that you have had for years unnoticed. It requires work, many pieces coming together.

Community software development (or any development for that matter) is much more complex than one would want. It needs organization and expertise in crafts one wouldn’t think before. That is one of the main reasons to push for KDE to me: having people from different fields coming together to make wonderful things happen. (Community as a Service, CaaS. Have we coined that yet?)

Barcelona Free Software

Life is all about balance. From generic to specific, from big to flexible. Life artifices made it so that my city, Barcelona, has become a focus of the KDE development and we had to take advantage of the opportunity. This time we went full local, we started to gather many people knowledgeable about KDE around and instead of creating yet another KDE thing, we created a group concerning Free Software in Barcelona.

With the huge help of Martín, we’ve built an open group to meet and discuss about Free Software in a nice and relaxed setting. It was a piece I always missed in the puzzle.

Barcelona Free Software logo, thanks to Jens Reuterberg

How to make the world use Free Software?
For example, people around me. Are we offering what they need? What do they use?
How come I don’t even know them? What do they create?

KDE, the present and present+1

26 June 2013 / apol / 1 Comment

Usually I don’t blog because there’s not much going on. Lately it’s been because there’s been too much things going on.

As always in communities, it’s not something somebody is doing in his corner, but some synergy coming together in a beautiful and convoluted way. Let me try to sort what I’m talking about.

The Akademy 2013 is happening soon. It’s going to be a very interesting event, KDE is evolving in a fast pace, more than most of us realize. This year’s Akademy will be crucial to the future of the project, I wouldn’t miss it.
This year, Akademy comes with a small present in it. The Akademy-es 2013 will happen in Bilbao as well, the two days before the Akademy. It’s our biggest opportunity to help people from Spain join the KDE awesomeness. If you are around and understand Spanish, don’t hesitate to join!
We’ll have talks, we’ll have discussions and we’ll tell you that you must go to Akademy. 🙂
Qt5 is gaining traction and we’re getting up to speed to adopt it through the KDE Frameworks 5 Project. The Qt contributors will be meeting in Bilbao as well, discussing what features we’ll be finding in Qt 5.2 and further. That means that they’ll be deciding what things we’ll have available for future releases by KDE!

Ok, so I’m saying that we’ll be gathering a bunch of people talking about what we do. What’s so special about that?
Well, first of all it’s not just people. It’s people who are passionate about what they do, the people who have created the KDE we all know and the one we don’t know about yet.

Personally, these are the topics I’d like to discuss about this year:

I want to talk to distributions. I want to remind them that Muon Discover will be working on their platform soon. I want to work together with them to make sure they are on board and that it will go smoothly.
I want to get in touch with the KDE Edu fellows, see what they’re up to (I hear that there’s some new awesome application coming together). I want to discuss about Khipu with them, it’s seeing some very interesting progress recently, I’m hoping to see it released soon!
The KDevelop team will be having their meeting there as well. I foresee a closer and closer KDevelop 4.6 release, and we want to make this one the best ever. Also I’d like to discuss some otherwise interesting stuff as well such as some changes in the C++ support that we’ve been discussing.
I’m quite excited about the KPeople project, as well. It’s coming together very well, getting ready for applications to adopt it. KDE Telepathy has already started worked on supporting it on some parts. Also KDE PIM should be adopting it soon, so will other projects. I want to easily interact with my friends from our applications. Awesomeness.
And last but not least, the KDE Frameworks 5 project, that I already talked about before. It’s probably the most important initiative in KDE, at the moment. Let’s push it all together, at Akademy!

I know it’s been a huge blog post, but also I think that it displays where we are. Lots of people, a big community, with smaller communities in it, coming together for a greater purpose, having beer and exchanging ideas.

\o/

See you in Bilbao!

KDE and Free Software conferences @ home

2 July 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Yesterday the Jornades del Programari Lliure finished. This event that was quite important to me, I’ll try to explain a little why and what conclusions did I extract from it. If you don’t really can’t bother about it, just stay with the thought that it was a great experience :).

I always like to go to free software events, regardless it’s a KDE event or not. It’s a good way to step back at what I’ve been doing for the last years and to process a little if it makes sense, if it’s worth it and to consider other’s positions to check why are they working in different stuff and if I should change my views (all in all, not everyone is working in KDE Edu and KDevelop,… surprisingly :)).

There were a lot of conversations and different opinions, I still do hear people claiming that we have to outcome the big proprietary projects. There’s been an important change here, now the best/biggest projects are those who use better Free Software (or Open Source like some people call it) wisely, I don’t think there’s that much of a battle with free software or not from the development perspective. We’re there, now we need to make KDE one of those communities that we want people to work with and to work on. That said, let’s get all this awesomeness to the end users, who usually aren’t aware of that.

Also it was nice to see more faces than in the usual meetings, it’s always good to see that there’s people who trust in what you do even if they’re not actively contributing. There’s a lot of profiles to fulfill in the free software world and we still need a lot of passionate people.

And, last but not least, thanks to the organization to put together some really nice conferences, to even bring some international speakers (hey Aaron! :)), to try to make us think a little about what what’s being done and to give us the opportunity to talk about our passion.

See you soon! \o/

So… what’s cooking?

27 April 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

I’ve probably been talking lately too much about where I was going to spread my KDE love and talking too little about what I’ve been doing and what’s happening:

Akademy-es: Yes! we’re having the Akademy-es in Barcelona this year and I know you won’t miss it. Yay! Awesome. Well it takes some preparation, so it takes some time. I feel I’m quite lucky I could find a rather big team of local KDE enthusiasts, that way I don’t have to do it all by myself but truth is it’s time consuming and love consuming. By the way, if anybody wants to help, just poke me and remember to register if you want to come!

KDE Edu: We had our yearly meeting. In my opinion most of our group work was about getting the best out of GSoC and the rebranding. The GSoC results where out last week, I hope the best luck for all the GSoC student, as an ex-student I can remember the excitement of being accepted, so congrat’s to all of them :). About the rebranding, news will be coming soon :). On the KAlgebra side, the language has improved tons since 1 year ago, it’s quite hard to show that to the KAlgebra user I guess, but we’ll get there, for the moment rocs looks like it will be the next victim.

KDevelop: As some of you already know, I’m working on my final engineering project around KDevelop, doing some static analysis using our infrastructure. It’s still going forward but it’s keeping me to commit new features to KDevelop lately, I hope I’ll fix that soon, though… >:) I’ve got some crazy ideas to be put in place, since I don’t like to talk about something that’s not implemented, you’d better wait and see :). If anyone is interested in static analysis (on c++ for the moment) you can find me in irc/e-mail and we can talk about life and spring 🙂 oh and static analysis.

In the end, a lot of things are moving, I don’t have as much coding time as I’d like since there’s always something that sounds that if I don’t do it nobody will, probably I shouldn’t think like that… but oh well, I hope everyone will enjoy my KDE areas the way we all enjoy KDE.

Hugs for everyone! \o/

Extending Call for Papers period

22 April 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Hi!

As some of you will know, we’re celebrating the yearly KDE Spanish event the next 20th to 22nd May in Barcelona. Since we don’t want to leave any of you behind, we’ve decided to extend the Call for Papers period for an extra week so that you can get your ideas ready in time. The CfP will close the 28th and the schedule will be ready by the 1st May.

Hope that will help to get all of you in :). And remember! If you’re planning to come, please register here: http://kde-espana.es/akademy-es2011/registro.php.

If you need lodging and you are not sure where to go, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us so that we can give you some hints!

See you in Barcelona!

April of KDE

24 March 2011 / apol / 0 Comments

Hi!
Some intensive days are coming let’s talk about it a little :).

Next week I’ll be going to San Francisco because I’ll be attending to Camp KDE. It’s specially interesting to go there because it’s a very nice opportunity to get in touch with a KDE community that is not usually around in the events I’ve been going (it’s going to be my first KDE meeting outside of Europe). There I will be talking about KDevelop and KDE Edu (no wonder), two beautiful projects from a beautiful community like KDE, can’t be more proud of it :).

The day after I come back I’ll be going to Bilbao where we’re celebrating this year’s KDE Edu sprint. I feel like it’s an important step for KDE Edu because it will be the first time where we are celebrating it in an education context and because we will be gathering some important people from this country who is interested in education. Hopefully we will be able to take our project to the next level, so yay us! (again :)).

And last but not least, I’ll be going to Vigo the week after that, where I will give the KDE talks in the Free Software master by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Igalia. I’m happy to see these initiatives happening here and proud to help to take it to the next level. (yay us! bis bis).

And last but not least, thanks to all the sponsors the KDE eV board and, in the end, all the people who makes this kind of things possible :). See you soon!