Rainy Hacking

(…) And so we left towards the tropical paradise of Praia do Forte (Fort Beach, that is). Packed on my discrete 18.4”, 8 pounds ‘netbook’ , a couple of guitars, a keyboard and beach wear. At first sight, what seemed to be a good hacking experience and the development of some KDE-related acquaintanceship, along with sunny beach fun ended up in a quite different way.

Notwithstanding the rain, I must admit that the overall experience was not good within Akademy-BR. It was great. In a supportively manner, everybody contributed – just as the opensource collaborative hivemind says we must – to the development of a keyword that describes the feeling for every participant : oneness.

We were about 30, scattered over this immense country, sharing accents and cultures, working together. We developed more than applications, fixes and promotion material – for me, I’d say: I developed friendships.

Well, if that’s the spirit of development sprints, sign me in for the next one! And what did I do during this period?

On day 1, I kept working on my GSoC proposal: KDE Git Tool and KPart. Unfortunately, I failed to submit the images that were supposed to come along, but I hope that it won’t be a major concern during evaluation.

While on the KDE-Games sprint everybody seemed to be working with card games, Tomaz kindly ‘forced’ me to work in the development of a game called Crokinole (day 2!). It sounded fun, so I jumped right into it, and started to implement the 2D game engine, along with collisions and dynamic physics (I know, I know, I will go for Box2D or ODE anytime soon, but I just wanted to learn how to do it). Although my calculations are rather feasible, it perhaps (not really close to reality) can be an option to take it further. As soon as I have something solid and playable, I will post it here!

I will not post any screenshots for now since there isn’t much to ‘see’. Day 3 ended up sooner than expected, and we left in the morning with Hélio Castro, in a – still – rainy trip to the Airport. We got there in time, he didn’t lose his flight, and everything is fine (I hope so!).

And who am I? Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Alexandre (or Alex) Raymond, computer science student, a real enthusiast of good ol’ C programming and a newly-addicted C++/Qt hacker. I usually lecture C extension courses on universities around here, and work severely to evangelize (away from the evils of Java) my colleagues and friends. I’m also an amateur instrumental (classical guitar) composer and crazy about motorsports and driving!

I would like to thank everyone involved to make the Akademy-BR possible! Some special thanks to Tomaz, Sandro, Hélio and Piacentini for their words of wisdom and guidance!

See you next time!

Alex Raymond