First and foremost, I would like to express the gratitude for my second year of university, which was the most exhausting period of studies that I’ve had so far but taught me a great deal of patience, focus, and perseverance. Also, I cannot but mention that never have I valued friendship as much as I do now. I was able to pass my exams with satisfying grades, and while I do not yet feel ready to dive into the next academic year, I am a lot more confident about its success.

Next, I would like to thank KDE for the most exciting learning experience I could wish for: the Plasma Mobile sprint in Berlin that I was lucky to attend. I have never met so many passionate developers in one place before, and learning from them, as well as contributing my humble bits of knowledge, was priceless.

And a special thanks to Linus and Jonah for showing me around the city 😃

Finally, I am incredibly thankful to Google for having me as a Software Engineering intern in Munich this summer 😃

Making Linux application support in Chrome OS easier to manage for schools, enterprises and individuals is by far the biggest contribution to the Linux ecosystem that I can possibly make. Most googlers I had a chance to meet are very positive, cheerful and helpful. My first feature has landed the Chromium codebase today, and I am very excited and motivated for the rest of my work here.

To make sure you don’t have to wait another half a year to hear from me, I’m sharing my Instagram; I seem to be more responsible at posting pics of cute stuff around me than at serious blogging 🙂

I wanted to keep this update short and easy to read. If, however, I managed to get you interested and craving for more info, feel free to reach out to me!.

And have a great summer! 😄

On 25-26th of August I was lucky to be there and give an introductory talk about Plasma Mobile, Halium and other projects that aim for a complete GNU/Linux experience on smartphones and tablets.

That was my first talk at a big event, and I was very emotional and nervous. Nevertheless, the talk went just fine, people were interested in our work around Plasma Mobile, and we had a long discussion about the future of GNU/Linux on mobiles as we see it.

I plan to turn my talk into a big blog post (or a series, if appropriate) so that all the stuff I collected and learned could be useful for more people. Stay tuned!

I would like to thank event organizers for the amazing experience and a chance to talk about my passion to the smart geeky crowd of Chaos Constructions! 🙂

Also, a big shout-out to @JBBGameich, Bhushan Shah, and @NotKit for their help with putting my device into shape for the talk.

If you would like to join Plasma Mobile development, you can always find interesting tasks here and here.

For more news of the Russian KDE community, join us at vk.com/kde_ru or t.me/kde_ru.

I had posted this news on Twitter some time ago, but I’m still happy that my port got mature enough to deliver hardware-accelerated graphics:

This port is quite special as the phone has an x86 CPU, a PowerVR GPU and a closed-source HWComposer. To make it possible, I authored a number of patches to Libhybris and Halium; as of now, most of them have been merged. I am going to continue my work on the device.

There have been no messages from me for a while, mostly due to my exams, and I feel guilty of the silence. Now that’s high time I write about my experience.

The most important event in my life for the past few months is the Google Code-In trip. It was an amazing opportunity to meet so many interesting people, see lots of stunning views, visit lots of amazing places, hear talks about topics I’ve never thought of before and make new friends.

With all the planes, trains and buses, it was also a big journey with an 11-hour time difference from my home.

I am SO thankful to the Google Open Source team, particularly Stephanie and Mary, for their continuous work on making Google a hospitable place for students, mentors and parents from all over the world. They paid special attention to the food (yummy!) and even invited whales 🙂

I am looking forward to meeting my new friends again.

At the moment, me, Filip Grzywok and Soham Sen (other GPW winners) are working on a cool app. I highly recommend you to follow updates on the development; we expect our project to be released by the end of the summer.

I am also now working on porting Halium, a hardware abstraction layer developed by KDE, UBPorts, Mer and Sailfish, to ASUS ZenFone 5. It’s quite difficult for me, but the communities around the project are very helpful (special thanks to Bhushan Shah and JBB) and I learn quite fast. When I succeed with porting, my phone is going to be the first x86 device to run Plasma Mobile!

Currently, I am entering a university. That’s an important step in my life, so I am very immersed in it.

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed reading and don’t feel like having wasted your time. If you want to ask me anything, suggest an idea on improving my blog or just talk, feel free to contact me by any means suggested in “Contacts”.

Have a great day!