Later this week, I'm leaving for Zurich, and from there I'll take the train up to Randa (up, in the sense that I live at sea level, and Randa is the length of one million micro-SD cards laid end-to-end higher).

In Randa, I'll be working as a KDE developer, and as a Calamares developer, and learning about accessibility tooling. There's about 60 hacking hours in that week. I'll also be working as the cook, for one day. There's about 12 cooking hours in a day, since feeding 30 people takes a lot of vegetable-chopping, bread-slicing, and dish-washing.

That is something special about Randa, I think: the feeling of much closer "living together", and the way the attendees work together to create an optimal hacking environment. And cooking (along with the hacking) is my way of supporting the Randa meeting.

You can support the Randa meeting, too. That doesn't support me; it supports other attendees who need to make long trips, it defrays the costs associated with infrastructure, it brings networking to town for a week. Support the Randa meetings for this year's theme, or for the idea of a focussed retreat for hacking.

There's a dot story about plans for the meeting. There will be summaries as well, and blog-roundups. But blog-roundups are tricky, because of the kind of things we (attendees) tend to write about. When blogging about the Randa meeting, I'll probably blog more about food and hikes than about the hacking. The non-hacking bits make for better stories, even if the point of being there is the hacking. The results of the long coding sessions -- privilege-separating Calamares, double-checking accessibility of KDE on FreeBSD -- will show up later, in a future Calamares release or KDE-FreeBSD update. That's the long-term payoff.