Month: July 2013

This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V. during Akademy will be my last one as a member of the KDE e.V.‘s Board of Directors. I had been elected during Akademy 2006 in Dublin, and since then served the KDE community by working on organisational bits necessary to support a Free Software project. We’ve seen times where our environment wildly changed, times of growth, consolidation, growing pains. Looking back fills me with satisfaction how we have developed KDE e.V. as an organisation. I think KDE e.V. is exemplary in many ways for other Free Software, and Free Culture projects. One of the cornerstones here is continuity, we simply had the time to learn a lot, to define and implement necessary processes around administration, fund-raising, legal questions, conference organisation and many more. As it stands today, KDE e.V. is an organisation that provides the continuity necessary for a community to think ahead, and the necessary infrastructure to foster and support those next steps. KDE e.V. is also an organisation that constantly evolves, reacting, but also foreseeing and preparing for the next steps. We have a well-functioning team in place to guide this, and I’m confident that the current and coming board members will keep developing KDE e.V. as an organisation towards its goal of supporting KDE.

Earlier this year, I had also resigned from my role as one of KDE’s release managers. When I joined the release time, around KDE 3.5 (our software compilation was still called KDE back then), our release process was becoming dysfunctional. In KDE 3 times, coolo (to some known as Stephan Kulow) was the release dude, and it was all in his hands. He did a great job, but, just like in many other areas of KDE, embodied a single point of failure. Not that he, or others we relied on, ever failed, but it’s usually more a matter of statistics than personal skills, attitude and motivation. For critical tasks (and actually releasing all the work of such a community for others to use is a pretty critical one!), you want a team in place that can fall back on each other, both to spread workload and risks. Afin, KDE needed release managers, and after a detour through a more official body (the KDE e.V.-elected Technical Working Group, for those who remember this episode), it became clear that only a self-motivated group of people that want to get the job done will work. In hindsight, this sounds completely natural and closely aligned to KDE’s way of achieving things, but I think this way had to be walked, we have learned from it, and in the end, there’s a competent team in place which can deliver our software in time and quality. As being on the release team is work, and at times quite a lot, I wanted to get rid of this eventually. I managed to pull out, I think without leaving too much of a hole. A few releases have been done without me actively particating. Probably, most people won’t even have noticed. Perfect.

So am I on the way out? Most certainly not! I’ve been consistently shifting from organisational tasks to more technically oriented work, which to me personally, is a good development. I simply get more kicks out of writing code than reading emails. In that regard, I think I’m in good company.

On a professional level, I’ve been working for Blue Systems on Plasma’s upcoming version for a while now. I’m spending most of my time on Plasma and our Frameworks 5 effort, and enjoy that a lot. It gives me both the time to intimately understand more parts of our codebase, and much opportunity to learn new things and improve and develop existing skills. The work happens entirely within KDE infrastructure and community, and I’ve got a bunch of great colleagues who are equally eager to take big steps, technologically with our codebase. My role has now shifted a bit to also include team coordination tasks, which is an interesting exercise. On the one hand, a geographically spread team is harder to keep track of, but this is offset by the great motivation, skills and attitude of my colleagues (within both Blue Systems and KDE).

Luckily, my life’s not all KDE and the serious business of software development. In May, Kim and me travelled to Indonesia. We spent a few nights in the jungle of Borneo, took a walk with Orang Utans. We planted trees, and slept the nights on the deck of our boat acompanied by jungle noises and clear skies. On Java, we visited the Borobodur, a giant buddhistic temple, one of the 7 wonders of the world, we learnt about the roots (literally and figuratively) of many conveniences such as coffee, rice, tobacco and latex. We climbed up a Volcano. From Java, we set off to Bali, travelled along its North coast and then spent some time on Gili Trawangan, which is part of a group of sandy, tropical islands just off the coast of Lombok. The time in Bali and on the Gilis did my scuba diving skills really well. The area is excellent for diving with warm waters and amazing marine life. My finning technique has improved vastly and I’ve got dehydration under control much better now. During our dives we spotted lots of coral, soft and hard, vast amounts of colourful reef fish, turtles, reef sharks, morays, sea snakes. The abundance of colour and life was enchanting, though fragile.

With all that said, some of you will meet me later this week in Bilbao for Akademy. I will arrive on Wednesday already, going to see Depeche Mode and The Editors at BKK festival. If you want to talk Frameworks5, Plasma2 or anything else which lies in my line of interest: Talk to me.