In two hours aKademy will be over for me. I'm going to head back for Germany. The last week was truly awsome. I had planned to blog a bit, but there was so much exciting stuff happening, that I didn't find any time to actually do so. So here are some of my personal highlights of aKademy, all in one.

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I'm done with packing. Tomorrow early morning I will leave for Dublin for aKademy 2006.

I wrecked my wrist nine days ago. My doctor says I will be able to use it again in a week. Hope he is right. I would cross my fingers, if it wouldn't hurt so much. Anyway, there are some exciting things I wanted to write about, so I'm blogging single-handedly now.

The last couple of months I have worked on the openSUSE Build Service. The goal of the Build Service is to make it dead easy for developers to provide installable packages of their software on a broad variety of distributions. We presented a first preview at FOSDEM. At the Linuxtag 2006, which takes place later this week in Wiesbaden, we will show the current state.

Aaron took on his asbestos suite and made a case for Python as a VisualBasic replacement for the free desktop. Ok, let's give him some fire and play the "my language is better than yours" game.

Python is obviously the wrong choice. Ironically it's Aaron in his blog who eloquently tells us why this is the case. There are technical reasons, but there are also social reasons. If the creator of the language is perceived as a blocker to the future of the language there is obviously something wrong.

KDE is again participating in Google's Summer of Code. We did this last year and got 24 exciting projects running. They had all kinds of results, from widely successfull over interesting concept to mild failure. I mentored three projects and it certainly was a great and enjoyable experience, so I will be a mentor again this year.

Today apparently was board-gets-back-to-coding day. Since I was elected into the board of the KDE e.V. last summer in Malaga most of my KDE time is eaten by non-coding jobs. But today I had one of my productive days and got a lot of done on kxml_compiler and kxforms. It was a nice surprise when I noticed on the kde-commits mailing list, that Eva also was heavily committing code working on Konqueror/Embedded. Five minutes before midnight Aaron joined the fun with a Kicker patch. Huzzah! We are back to the roots. The board is still coding.

The first big thing today was the release of KDE 3.5.1, made possible by the hundreds of dedicated contributors which make up the wonderful KDE community. Especially the translators did some great work, so KDE 3.5.1 is available in the incredible number of 63 languages.

Ruby is rolling. It's amazing how much enthusiasm it accumulates. There seems to be a broad movement of people exploring Ruby, using it and getting addicted. Especially because there is Rails. If there ever was a killer application for a programming language, here it is. Three examples for amazing Ruby adoption:

After spending some time with Inkscape I came up with a computerized version of our nice Akonadi architecture diagram. Inkscape is a great tool. It crashed once and I wasn't able to figure out how to put text on an arc path in a way that is also readable when the arc is upside down, but other than that I really enjoyed working with it.