Twentieth Winter and French Konnektion
Ohayo Gozaimosu!
This is going to a slightly informal post about my SoK experience. If you're looking for my status updates, the sixth and final status update was posted here.
My French KonneKt
Back during 2013 - 2015, I studied French at school. That was the first touch with this language for most students, as a result we did not have any serious texts in our coursebook. All texts were related to a French person/ couple/ family going out to the beach or monument or for picnic or something like that. For three years I studied that.
The net learning that a young Snehit had from those year was that the French are really cool people! Had I continued studying French, I would have been exposed to more serious texts, but I simply had to drop the subject when they got more focused on irregular verbs.
My Twentieth Winter
So what happened during the twentieth winter of my life? Of course, I had caught a cold after Christmas, which meant that my laptop and PC could finally get some rest. It also meant that I would be late to the join the KDE folks.
On 30th December 2021, I joined the KDE Flatpak Matrix channel, only to see that some potential contributors for the project have already introduced themselves. My health was in no mood to get to work, so I went back to sleep.
On 9th January 2022, I finally decided I was back in my usual high. Quickly checked the groups and oh my cat! Everyone had already gotten on to work. I scroll up the messages and find that three days prior to that, a cool sounding person had tagged four people and given them some instructions on how they could get started with the work. I felt I was far off, so I decided I could just help out the other contributors if they face roadblocks. That was the tiniest sweet thing a cake could do. And I do think I could help out a fine enthusiastic person on the channel.
French KonneKt Pt. 2
I was casually looking about the cool person I mentioned earlier, Timothée Ravier. YouTube seemed to have some videos by this person and wait what, he was speaking French???
I really needed to work with this cool person. I mean I wasn't expecting to virtually visit Le Louvre with him, but at least I could flex that I can pronounce the French 'r'!
So I speed run learning how to package as Flatpak. As I have mentioned many times already, I have experience in that, so it was rather smooth for me.
Timothée has been very helpful during our chats. Patiently listens to everything I say, while I go haywire telling him I did this, I broke that, I'll do this, I won't do that. I might just switch to an AZERTY keyboard, because I type his name too often these days and have to copy paste that é every time.
Getting to Work
Since I did not have classes in first 2-3 weeks of SoK, I speed ran my project (typical of me). A good number of applications were submitted to Flathub.
Next I tried reinventing the wheel, because I have a history of programming in Rust. As usual, I fell back to using a Python script. Flatpak External Data Checker got the work done, even though it did produce unexpected output at times.
Over on to the CI stuff, I wrote and rewrote^7 the build script. It not yet perfect, but I'll get to it very soon.
One potentially good thing to happen with me was that I started using Twitter. Now I'm more in sync with the abbreviations people use these days, thanks to the character limit. I hope they bring out the edit feature soon, and make the character limit 100x times longer so that long worded people like me feel at home there, but first I'm gonna petition to rename KDE Connect to KDE KonneKt.
What I Learnt
- Packaging
- Not running
rm -rfout of context (I once deleted my build directory and then had to rebuild many KDE apps again) - Being on time for online meetings (other's time is important too)
- Debating why JSON is better than YAML
Conclusions
French people are cool. So is whole of the KDE Community.