So this will be the first time theirishpenguin makes it onto Planet KDE! And no better time - blogging straight from the KDE community feast that is Akademy! It’s been a superb week, in the stunning city of Tampere in Finland. It’s Day 6 of the event, a day which has been quite a Ruby-tinted one. First up, I had the pleasure of hacking on Grantlee, a Django-inspired string templating engine in Qt, with Stephen Kelly; adding Ruby support to the code generator example it ships with. Also, after talking to Cornelius Schumacher from OpenSUSE I learned that Ruby’s splashed all over the place - even helping power the OpenSUSE Build Service which allows packages to be easily built for any distro. Cool, eh?

Grantlee’s an interesting project already in use in Akonadi integration and KJots, providing an elegant templating solution. It’s available on gitorious.org in the Grantlee repo. It was good fun hacking on it, particularly useful picking up on some of Stephen’s Ninja skills with git! At least it gives a couple of Irish lads something to do while all the Germans and Spaniards are talking about the World Cup!

The organisation of Akademy 2010 has been top notch, from the welcome packs with all the details you need to get oriented - to the big screen for the footie in the hacker room. This was matched by the friendliness of everyone who turned up to the event and the local Finnish. Even these two fellows had a great time coding…

Duck typing at Akademy I feel a duck typing joke coming on. Me too!

There’s been some interesting BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions, in particular the KDE Bioinformatics session with Luca Beltrame and KDE for Scientists session, again with Luca and also Stuart Jarvis. Some of the ideas raised pushed me to start working on getting ActiveResource support into Qt on Rails, to make hitting remote APIs possible from a Qt client app.

Well it’s 15 minutes to kick off in tonight’s semi-final. If anyone out there wants to talk about anything Ruby, or get a quick demo of Qt on Rails, then feel free to ping me. You can comment to this post or find me on twitter (theirishpenguin).

Last night we went Dutch… Tonight who knows…