Randa in General

One of the nice things about the Randa meetings is -- for me at least -- is the return to an almost student-like work scheme. Sleep, eat, code, repeat. The hacking room downstairs (there's two more upstairs) has 16 people in it, working on all corners of KDE. People move around to form pairs as needed. The Davids are in high demand. Alexander jumps at all kinds of problems, from Python to I18n. Tomaz is doing neat things with Subsurface and explaining things to others. Just sitting here means catching up with KDE technologies and hearing tips.

The consequence of these long hacking days is that a lot of little stuff gets fixed as well. Stuff that get shunted aside at the end of a regular working day, but that fills up little gaps in the 16 hour working day that most of the Randa attendees have here. A common turn of phrase seems to be "I have this little annoyance .." followed by some nearby participant saying "Yeah, I just fixed that."

Keeping up 16 hour working days for a week requires a lot of organization. And the wonderful thing is is that that organization is there, and that you can roll out of bed (watch out if you're in the upper bunk) and breakfast is ready. All the day-to-day necessities are already taken care of, and we can get to work. Catering to these day-to-day needs costs money, and you can support that (and therefore support the work that gets done) by making a donation to the Randa fundraiser.

A lot of the pictures you'll see that come out of Randa are the "pretty pictures", of the times between hacking sessions (which Lays Rodrigues describes above the pretty pictures). From here I can see 14 people behind laptops, water bottles, coffee cups, various candy wrappers, Umbrello, 3D-printing, flatpak, KMyMoney. There's a lot of work getting done, but it's not very photogenic.