just another day in paradise

What a week that was! Yesterday I did what I probably should have done on Tuesday: I slept. And I don't mean just through the night, but also through half the day. I've always been one of those people who recover best when sick while sleeping (as a child, sleeping over 24 hours at a stretch when sick wasn't unknown), and I was shaking a frustrating cold last week. Of course, instead of sleeping I was in Darmstadt.

We came away from the meeting with a huge task list, a lot of information and no less than five concurrent roadmaps for five different aspects of the meta-project we have been putting together. We're getting our notes in order, milestones settled a bit more firmly and initial documentation put together still, however. Sebastian will be blogging later with more details on this, so I won't get into details here.

There are two things that, while certainly not project definers, have caught my interest in special ways. The first is that due to the combination of schedule and complexity of the project (in terms of the number of individual efforts that are coming together for this) we are employing some more rigorous project management techniques. In particular, we will be using the scrum method with two week "sprint" intervals. The planning and organization of this will be done in public, and we're evaluating F/OSS scrum management tools. While not particularly new for software development, for our F/OSS projects it is. I'm particularly interested in seeing how well it meshes with the KDE culture.

The other interesting atribute is the scope of things. This is about KDE software, yes, but it's also taking the operating system and middleware stack on as well. We certainly are not doing an "OS from scratch" thing, but this may be the closest upstream KDE projects will have participated in what will end up being a download-and-try-or-flash image.

Outside of being brought into this project as part of a really great team, I've been kept "slightly" busy with other things as well. Today was the first day of my "intensive" German language course; 3 hours a day for next 3 weeks (at which point Tokamak interupts ;) at a waaay too early in the morning hour. Well, for me at least. After that, my work day starts.

This evening I'm attending the Linuxtage install event at ETH here in Zurich. I have prep work left to do still for Tokamak 5, where Plasma Quick will be a big part of the discussion. This is joining the growing list of events coming up, which now includes the X Free Software Workshop at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia at the end of June.

I was also on the Frostbyte Media's Froscast podcast this weekend. The show is an edited down version of an epic multi-hour conversation we had ranging from accessibility to what's new in the 4.6 releases and beyond. The host is an absolutely terrific fellow as well, and it was a joy to be his guest.

The tram is about to arrive at the building where the install fest is at, so I should wrap this up.