One September, Two Conferences. Part I: aKademy

A lot of water flew away since I promised to blog about RailsConf Europe 2006. And one major event started and finished also during that time - the aKademy conference. So during one September I managed to attend two software conferences which I haven't covered in my blog yet.

So here comes by aKademy report.

Everybody who blogs about aKademy agrees that aKademy was a great event and everybody thanks to Marcus and the guys in blue. All I can do is just add my personal thanks to all aKademy team who did a great job and were really supportive when I was bugging with my usual give-me-my-visa-paper requests!

As usual at aKademies, I didn't code much but rather spent a lot of time communicating with people. What's important is that this time we (as in KDevelop team) managed to solve (or at least discuss) quite a lot of problems that bothered us for ages. One of the most important issue was the UI design for which we have now more-or-less clear vision and even the prototype I wrote in Ruby in a couple of minutes. Once I'll find time to transfer the vision to paper (or rather email) it will appear at kdevelop-devel mailing list for discussion. All I can say now is that it seems we found rather cool compromise between UI simplicity and feature-full bloatness. What we did is basically we tried to find an intersection between ideas behind MacOSX's Finder and XCode, Eclipse's perspectives and splitted-tab layouts, KDevelop's Ideal toolviews. Such an intersection while not being radically innovative (like ZUI, for example) will hopefully give us a powerfull UI that no IDE has.

Of course, UI ideas were not the only thing we produced at aKademy. kdevelop-pg parser generator has been pushed to its full extent because Jakob started to (re)implement c++ parser with it. Adam put a lot of work to solidify the our code models stuff, and also I started to write a new model-based filemanager (already in trunk). Lot of other things happened too which I can't remember right now (probably because I spent many nights partying in Irish pubs;)).

Another thing we decided upon is that we're going to have a KDevelop conference/hacking session next year. We had it back in 2005 but missed this year and we certainly don't want to miss another year. So during KDevelop BoF it was decided to try organizing such event in mid-summer 2007. At this time we know of two possible candidates for the location. One is Boston, USA and another is the south cost of Crimea, Ukraine. In both cases we'd need some sponsorship so if you know how we can get it I'd much like to hear about that.

After aKademy I spent three days travelling the Ireland. I visited Killarney and made my way through The Ring of Kerry, I was in Cork and saw the Blarney Castle and I spent a day in Galway and Aran Islands. I got too many impressions to describe all them here. What I can say is that Ireland is certainly one of the best places of the world I ever visited.

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