Local KDE meetings rock, and you should be in one

I made my first contact with the KDE community about 4 years ago, in a bar in Barcelona. Do you want to know how was it?

A bunch of KDE enthusiasts from the sunny Barcelona (Spain) decided to organize a dinner in a restaurant to celebrate the launch of KDE 4.6. At that time, I was not even using KDE 4 (I was a happy KDE3 user instead!) but I though it would be nice to meet other people and discuss about the problems I had with KDE 4.

They were celebrating this kind of “release dinners” regularly in Barcelona, a casual gathering for all kind of people interested in KDE: users, non-users, developers, artists, translators, writers… very interesting people above all! And I had a very good time in my first experience, so I begun to go to these dinners frequently. They would usually end up in a bar having beers and discussing all kind of interesting (KDE and non-KDE related) topics.

By that time I was studying computer engineering, and I thought it was a good opportunity for me to meet smart developers and learn from them. In one of these dinners, I was talking with Àlex Fiestas (and I bet we both were quite drunk) about how difficult it was to use a smartphone and a computer together, even when both devices run similar OSes… And you may already have realized that the entire KDE Connect project started there!

KDE Dinner in Barcelona, 2013

I’m happy to still be in this awesome community today, four years later. The reason is that by myself I can only write code, but in KDE I find artists that will help me make my apps beautiful, translators that will make them available in tens of different languages, writers that will spread the word, and a platform behind it that will give visibility to software distributions, end users, and new contributors. Could I have done this alone? Probably not. And not only that, in KDE I also met great people. People that are now true friends.

Last year I moved to Seattle (WA), so I don’t live in Barcelona anymore. I found that they were also organizing local KDE meetings here, so I decided to go to one right away. And of course there I met another bunch of awesome people! Andrew Lake even let me sleep in their place until I found a permanent apartment in the city, and Valorie Zimmerman offered me an “adoptive family” for my first New Year’s Eve here. Yes, people is that awesome in this free software community :) Really, truly, incredible people.

But the point of this blogpost is not (only) to talk about my KDE story. It is about your KDE story. You should be doing this yourself! If there is a KDE meeting near you, go there, if there are none, recruit some friends and create one! Really, don’t be afraid: the worst thing that can happen if nobody assists is that you end up having a beer with your friends :D And, of course, if you live around Seattle, please join us in our next meeting!