It was an amazing week! I met some really cool people from both the Gnome and KDE camps, and had a fantastic time.
A particular personal highlight was attending the Gnome IM Integration BOF (what Gnome is doing with telepathy), some of the discussion wasn't relevant to me, but it was still incredibly productive and informative. I hopefully was able to help them with some parts, and they were able to help me with some technical issues I was facing. It was great to be able to talk to someone who had faced exactly the same problems only a few months ago, and had managed to come up with a way round it. When coming up with requirements for common backend components, the best way is for us to work together.
I spent a lot of my free time with part of the Gnome documentation team who gave me a lot of insight into ways KDE could do help a lot better.
I also had an opportunity to finally meet my GSOC student, Francesco, in real life. That was quite the (terrifying) experience 🙂
So many new ideas, new projects and not enough time to do it all!
We definitely need more close collaboration like this in order to make both Linux desktop environments achieve their full-potential.
Thanks to all the organisers, the rest of the volunteers and to the KDE eV for sponsoring my accomodation.