Myriam Schweingruber

… then here are some tips

Show us you are bright… and do your homework:

• Read the documentation

We can’t be there for you 24/7, so don’t expect to be spoon-fed information you can look up in documentation available online. While you will probably never hear a RTFM from us (we are polite), we do expect coders to be able to document themselves. You will be given a lot of links to documentation to read in the welcoming mail, so please do that: read and learn!

• Use your search engines and try to look up things on your own before asking.

In general, not doing some search on your own before asking questions is frowned upon, as it shows lazyness on your behalf.

• Don’t send private mail to potential mentors, use the mailing list

KDE is a community and we work on our projects in a collaborative effort. While there is usually one mentor assigned to an idea, there are co-mentors and we do coordinate our work in the mailing list. If you want to work with us, please do use the right channels for that. It also greatly enhances the probability to get an answer, as there are more eyes to see your mail. Private mails from unknown people can easily get lost in a filter, especially if they are badly formatted and sometimes not even have a subject line… *cough*

• Don’t ping people in IRC, and don’t open Queries without even asking if it is OK

There are some basic rules in IRC, all of which you can find online (search for “IRC Guidelines KDE”), so randomly pinging people you have never met or opening queries without asking beforehand are considered rude and are frowned upon. If you have an urgent matter, use the mailing list, not everybody is online all the time and not necessarily in your timezone. And if you ask a question on IRC, stick around so we can actually answer, don’t just leave after a few minutes. IRC is not for the impatient:

• Be patient!

We are usually very much occupied with our every day work and life and simply can’t be at your service just because you are there NOW. We do our best to answer your requests and questions in a timely fashion, but don’t be impatient, that is not making things go faster.  Your request is usually not as urgent as YOU might think it is. Did you try to search online and in the documentation on your own? No? Why not?

Remember: there is life out there, and that is often in the way of answering your requests as fast as you would like it to happen.

• Know what you are going to work on

You want to be a GSoC student but you don’t know your basic 101 of coding? Sorry, that is not for you, then. Consider applying for SoK instead. You need to at least have some basic knowledge of the business you want to get involved in. So if you want to participate, show us you know what you are talking about. The best way to show us is to do some coding beforehand, we have plenty of junior jobs with low hanging fruits.

• You can’t choose what project is the best for you?

We can’t do that either, sorry, as we usually only just met you. Just telling us what coding language you know about is not helping either, as we assume that to be part of your 101 skills box. You are the one who needs to decide what to work on, how and in what time frame. You want to participate, then make your mind up, study, read, use the software you are planning to work on, that is the best way to find out if it is suitable for you. And do look at the proposals made by other students in previous years, Lydia did send a nice mail to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list detailing that. You are not on that list? Well then what are you waiting for?

I am NOT detailing links here on purpose: the various mailing lists of KDE can easily be found online, and there have been dozens of mails from me or Lydia or other people with links and instructions that can all be looked up in the archives, most of that in the last 2 months which will help you narrow the search. These mails contain all you need to know

All of the above applies mainly to GSoC, but also to OPW and SoK to some extend. Don’t recognize these terms? Are you sure you read the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list?

Outreach Program For Women Logo. CC-BY-SA - artists: Máirín Duffy, Liansu Yu, Hylke Bons

KDE will – for the first time this year – participate in the “Outreach Program for Women”. This was originally started by GNOME, but has also other participating organisations like Wikimedia, Mozilla, Fedora and others.

With KDAB as our sponsor we will be offering one internship. This is in no way only limited to coding, but includes user experience design, graphic design, documentation, web development, marketing, translation and other types of tasks needed to sustain a Free Software project.

The deadline for task submission is March 27. Please all in the KDE Community, suggest suitable tasks on our wiki page and volunteer to mentor. Feel free to contact me or Lydia for more information.

Prerequisites for application: Any woman who has not previously participated in an Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code internship is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period. This program is open to anyone who identifies as a woman regardless of gender presentation or assigned sex at birth. Genderqueer and genderfluid people are welcome to apply.

The application deadline for candidates is already on May 1st, while the program runs from June 17 to September 23.

It’s this time of the year again, where we express our love for what and whom we like:

This year I want to express my personal thanks to

• the kmail developers for the awesome work during the last year,
• the KDE sysadmins for being so fast and efficient,
• the Amarok team for their love and dedication,
• the Sconcho developer for being so responsive and making my knitting pattern editing so easy,
• the whole FSFE team for their hard work on protecting our Freedom!

Keep up the good work, folks

It was a very busy End of Year again:

Amarok 2.7 is out! While the code-name “A Minor Tune” would suggest it to be an average release, it is in fact one of the most polished we ever did. 473 bugs closed, 17 feature requests granted and not less than 100 commits that fixed bugs directly. Rock On!

We also ship a fully updated handbook for this version, with new screenshots. For that we had some help from the Google Code-In students who helped updating the handbook. Amarok also moved it’s wikis to the KDE infrastructure with the help of several students, you can now find the Amarok wiki at http://community.kde.org/Amarok

Google Code-In also saw several students doing some quality work for Amarok, testing the 2.7 beta release as well as with the current git source, and updating the testing instructions on the wiki while doing so. A new Team page also has seen the light thanks to Code-In work: http://amarok.kde.org/en/team

Over all: great work from the Amarok Team and the Google Code-In students, thank you!

PS: the color theme is ‘Evening Lilac’