My experience taking part in Season of KDE
My experience taking part in Season of KDE
Background and motivations.
The year : 2020. Covid-19 has reached Europe, and a high-school student finds himself trapped home with a lot more free time than usual. So, of course, he spends the first week playing video games practically non-stop. However, he soon gets slightly bored by it, and begins to follow an online tutorial about programming in c++ with an introduction to the Qt framework.
Fast-forward to 2022. In the meantime, I had made the switch to Linux, and I had continued to make small c++/Qt programs in my free time. I decided that it would be nice to put my knowledge to practice, and do something useful for the community. KDE was a natural choice, as I really enjoy Plasma and the KDE apps, and I already had some experience with c++ and Qt.
What is Season of Kde ?
“Season of KDE is an outreach program hosted by the KDE community. The Season of KDE provides an opportunity for people to do mentored projects for KDE.”
- https://community.kde.org/SoK/About
The Adventure Begins !
The first challenge was to choose what to do. Coming from the outside, it is hard to know what projects are in active development, and where help is needed. This is one of the big advantages of SoK, as developers can submit project ideas, so mentees can just pick what interests them. However, I ultimately chose not to work on a proposed project, but to work on AudioTube. AudioTube is a YouTube Music client I had discovered a short while before, and which, most importantly, is in active development and I had some Ideas on features I could implement.
I got in touch with the developers and found some amazing persons who where willing to mentor my project, namely Jonah Brüchert, Carl Schwan and Devin Lin.
After having written the project proposal and set up a development environment, everything was ready to start !
The first merge request
I wanted to start with something simple. Adding the ability to remove songs from the playback history. Just adding an item to a popup menu and writing a small backend, what could be hard about that ? Wait, this application uses qml ? No widgets ?
qml crash-course
It turned out the ui side was still pretty easy, I just had to copy-paste some lines of code and change some keywords. The backend was a little bit more challenging, requiring some sql and a separate c++ class to handle when the menu item should be displayed, but nothing undoable
And then it was time to submit my first ever merge request (and getting aquainted with git and gitlab !).
Later merge requests
As a natural continuation to this first success, I began to work on making it possible to remove old search queries to the database. The search queries were handled by a model-view pattern. It turned out that the model was reset and reloaded every time a change was made to it, so I made it possible to change the model and the underlying database separately.
I also implemented a volume slider, a “clear playlist” button, the ability to play the favourite and most played songs as a playlist, enabled keyboard navigation of search propositions, and introduced support for the mpris standard, making it possible to control AudioTube from the system tray.
Useful lessons
If you hesitate to start contributing to an open source project because you have no previous experience in development, I can only encourage you to give it a shot. It isn’t really complicated. Also, it is very fun and there are lots of people who will gladly help you to get started. You might want to consider the following tips (most of them should also be valid outside of SoK and KDe) :
- Start small. In the first merge request, you will need to get accustomed to many new tools and a new code base. So first make some small, easy changes to get the hang of it and gradually move to more complex, exiting new features.
- When you encounter a new tool, learn only what you need for your current task. You don’t need to go through the whole git book before you can make your first contribution. If you learn only what you currently need, you’ll be able to get started much faster, and you can learn more every time you use that tool.
- Don’t hesitate to ask for help. It is always good to try to solve problems yourself, but if you’re stuck somewhere, consider asking more experienced contributors. You’ll most probably learn something along the way.
- If you want to start out in KDE, you’ll find useful information at https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved. Also, the #kde-welcome:kde.org matrix room is intended for new developers.
Closing thoughts
Getting new contributors is absolutely crucial for a healthy, long-living open source project. It is therefore important to make the onboarding process as easy as possible. Season of KDE achieves this by providing project ideas and facilitating the process of finding mentors to help. So, if you are already a contributor and have a nice idea for a project, please consider submitting it next year at SoK and maybe propose to mentor it. Or put it in the junior job list. And thanks for being patient with us newbies who make stupid mistake and ask obvious questions ;)
I also want to thank everybody who makes Season of KDE possible, especially my mentors.