Osnabrueck

Tuesday 5th February, 2008 @ 11:49 pm

I went to Osnabrueck this weekend for my second KDE meeting, the first being Akademy. This felt pretty different because I am now ~~not~~ less of a complete noob when it comes to Qt/KDE programming. It was nice in a smaller setting to get to know some of the IRC nicks a bit better and really got me on fire for working harder and longer on KDE.

I mostly hacked on my blogging kresource at the weekend and a little bit on the kblog library, making some bugfixes and fixing some segfaults. A gotcha I found with Qt programming is that you need to be very, very careful about your timing of deleting objects as if you are an idiot like me you will forget that the object has slots (callbacks for non-Qt people) which will try to access it and then bite you in the arse. That problem alone wasted about 10 hours hacking time!

Germany was cool, everyone I met spoke great English and was very helpful. I felt mildly embarrassed that I didn’t speak any German beyond “Ya” and “Nein” but no-one made me feel like the ignorant Brit that I am.

It has been my first time meeting lots of new people since I moved to Ipswich. I found the need, when asked where I was from, to say “Scotland” but that I now live in Ipswich. I think I could live here 70 years and I’d still think of myself as Scottish first and foremost.

It was exciting to be involved in some of the meetings, even if I didn’t have much to contribute. KDEPIM 4.1 will be a great release with a lot of cool things coming in from KDAB and the enterprise branch and the beginnings of Akondai starting to emerge. It’ll be nice for me to have some actual GUI code that users will directly interact with in a major KDE release also and I look forward to moving my desktop full-time to KDE4 as currently I have to flick backwards and forwards.

Anyway, a big shout out to the KDEPIM guys, thanks for a great weekend and a pleasure to meet you all!