Category: Presentations & Interviews

Interview on Tech Over Tea about KDE’s position in the world

I recently went on Brodie Robertson’s Tech Over Tea channel for a second time. I guess I didn’t succeed at pissing him off enough on the first go-around, because he invited me back! Let’s see if I did a better job of it this time by telling him he was using Arch wrong. 😀

Anyway, Brodie was a fantastic host, and we talked about a number of topics such as KDE’s position in the world, institutional continuity, fundraising and financial stability, the difficulty of reporting and triaging bug, the challenges of packaging software, and windows that block WiFi signals.

I hope you enjoy it!

And here’s the link I mention at the end: https://kde.org/community/donations 🙂

Akademy 2023

As you may have seen from other posts on https://planet.kde.org, KDE’s annual Akademy conference is over and people are starting to blog about their thoughts on it!

This is my fifth Akademy, and my third one attending in person. As always, it was great to meet up with colleagues and old friends in real life! A kind of magic happens when a bunch of technically adept people with strong social relationships gather together in a room. There was a lot of it on display this year, even despite the punishing heat and spotty Wi-Fi performance!

The talks this year were quite good (as always), and I hope that at least one of mine could be counted among them. I gave a talk about my KDE Goal, “Automation and Systematization“, and a short lighting talk about Welcome Center, in addition to helping to present the KDE e.V. Board report. I particularly enjoyed the lightning talk by Kai Uwe Broulik about his custom solar PV array monitoring system using System Monitor, which I would love to get running for my own system!

But my favorite part of Akademy is always what comes afterwards: the “Birds of a Feather” (or BoF) brainstorming sessions. My favorites were the ones on Tuesday organized by Joseph De Veaugh-Geiss on the subject of internal communication. These were very productive and resulted in multiple actionable tasks as well as an impromptu hacking session/sprint on Thursday to update old wiki pages, consolidate information, and use the default Wikimedia theme! Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend, but this is a subject I’m really excited about as I think documentation and internal communications are critically important topics, so it was wonderful to see so many other people excited about it too. If you’d like to help, please update any stale information or whole pages you find at https://community.kde.org. If you find a stale page but don’t feel comfortable making any such changes yourself, just edit it and add the text {{Outdated}} to the top, and someone else will handle it.

Overall, it was a useful productive and great time! After so many trips to Europe over the past 6 months, I’m now looking forward to some nice, uninterrupted stretches of normalcy where I can sit down and do some much-needed hacking and KDE e.V. work that’s been piling up, and actually implement some of the ideas and changes that we’ve all been discussing!

Presentation at University of Macedonia: Making a Difference

Today I had the honor of delivering a virtual presentation with fellow KDE contributor Neofytos Kolokotronis at the University of Macedonia, the site of KDE’s 2023 Akademy conference. The subject was “Making a Difference: How to contribute and jump start your career in Free Software with the KDE Community”, making it especially relevant for those who have been looking to get started contributing to KDE and don’t yet know how. But even if you’re a seasoned KDE contributor, I bet you’ll learn a thing or two about KDE’s storied history or ambitious plans!

Check it out:

Interview on the Sudo Show

The latest episode of the Sudo Show with Brandon Johnson and Neal Gompa has an interview with me, on the subject of Kommercializing KDE. It’s quite relevant to my goal of getting our software on the all the hardware we can (AKA World Domination) so give it a listen!

You can also listen right here:

Hope you enjoyed it! And if you like what KDE is doing and want to help its contributors make a living, consider making a donation!

Akademy 2022 talk: Konquering the World – Are We There Yet?

Two weeks ago I attended Akademy in Barcelona, KDE’s annual conference. Let me tell you, it was great to finally, finally, finally see people in person again! It was so nice to meet up with old friends, and put faces to names for new ones!

Four years ago I gave a perhaps arrogantly ambitious talk at Akademy 2018 entitled “Konquering the World – a 7-Step Plan to KDE World Domination“. In it, I described how the at-the-time new Usability & Productivity goal supported a deeper end goal of getting KDE Plasma pre-installed on commercially available hardware–that being the only way I believe we can introduce a truly huge number of new people to KDE’s friendly and powerful flavor of free software.

Four years later, the Usability & Productivity goal has been completed, with basically everything it set out to do being done now! So at this year’s Akademy, I gave a talk to discuss the progress in getting KDE Plasma preinstalled on hardware. What were our successes, and what do we still need to work on to make further gains in the arena of pre-installation? Find out here!

TL;DW version: check out https://kde.org/hardware 🙂