It's been a busy half-year since Kodi's 2016 Developers' Conference last September in Budapest. During that time Kodi v17.0 "Krypton" was released, quickly followed by v17.1, a bug-fix only release. We made our way into the Windows Store, managed to scare a lot of fans with our April 1st prank and redecorated while you weren't looking.

We went all-in with our shiny new CMake-powered build system, and kicked Autotools, XCode and VS solutions into oblivion. Thanks to notspiff, his six-year effort and the help of a few team members, "needs an Xcode sync" is a thing of the past.

We changed Kodi’s new default look - again! - and dropped our outdated web interface in favor of a beautiful, brand new and more functional one, written from scratch by jez500, the team member also responsible for migrating our site to Drupal.

Working in close collaboration with Plex, team member ruuk wrote a fantastic add-on that brings Plex's experience to Kodi. The best of both worlds together, easier than ever.

We were accepted into Google Summer of Code 2017 and garbear finally merged into master an inconspicuous fix for a long-standing and very annoying bug. It only took him 4+ years of work and several complete rewrites. Kudos!

Sadly, not all is good news. The world lost a princess but we gained a codename for Kodi v18, "Leia".

The rest is business as usual. Sleepless nights and countless hours working to bring you the best media center software available on the 3rd rock from the sun - and, probably, the universe.

DevCon: 5 – 7 May, 2017

Traditionally, Kodi's Developers' Conferences are held in early fall, usually September or October. This year we decided for something different: an early spring DevCon with, hopefully, sunny weather and birds chirping.

We're excited to announce that the 2017 Kodi's Developers' Conference will be from the 5th through the 7th of May in Porto, Portugal. That's roughly one month away.

We'd like to take a moment to thank our DevCon sponsor,. These events are costly and without their generous contribution much harder to finance.

As always, we'll continue to talk about ways to improve the software we all love: Kodi for Windows x64 and UWP, GSOC projects, database refactoring, and server and infrastructure improvements are some of the scheduled topics. Perhaps most exciting to all you Kodi fans out there is that we're also going to fine-tune the path for the release of Kodi v18, "Leia".

Drinks and Devs Night

Finally, we're extremely interested in meeting up with our users. To that end, we'd like to invite all of you, and particularly those of you in Porto, and wherever else seems reasonably close, to hang with us. We're still working out the last minute details, but definitely leave a comment in the forums if you're interested in visiting. We're excited to see you and get your thoughts and opinions.