KDE Tutorials, and several updates

Hello everyone,

I am blogging from Canada at the moment, where I am going to spend the month of November before going to San Francisco to attend Qt Dev Days, hoping to see many of you there. While I’m here, I wanted to give you a brief update of what’s happening behind the scenes and about some initiatives we had.

KDE Tutorials

Last month, in an initiative to gather more contributors, Lydia, Myriam and me held and managed a series of live tutorials about KDE. You can find the sample code I used for mine in a scratch git repository after this link. The tutorial was overall a success, and it’s something we’re gonna repeat in the near future. However, many things went wrong and need fixing to allow a better experience.

Technical problems

We tried using the Hangouts feature of G+ to hold the tutorial. We had a series of problems regarding the attendants unable to join, or non fluent video/audio streams. Besides that, we got an impressive response despite the very short time we had between the announcement and the tutorial itself. Turns out no more than 10 people can join the same hangout at the same time, making it quite impossible to handle such a thing with a decently sized audience.

Also, I didn’t manage to record the tutorial, as recordmydesktop constantly got out of memory and crashed every time. We are looking forward to suggestions on how to fix this in the next tutorials, and people helping us in providing a reliable infrastructure for live training. Do you have ideas, the know-how, and want to help? Get in touch!

What’s next for tutorials?

As I anticipated, I will do soon a series of off-line tutorials (videos) with the concepts of my last one to be posted on Planet KDE and such. But we’re keen on pursuing the live tutorial way, and we look forward to organize more of those. And since the audience is YOU, you decide: what would you like to see in an upcoming tutorial? Don’t be afraid to ask, and a friendly KDE developer will eventually hold one on the topic you suggested!

In short, you can expect more events and videos to help people getting involved in KDE even more easily. But show us your interest, excitement and your ideas: you’re going to help us and motivate us in organizing more.

Power management

As a short heads-up, everything I have been talking about in my last blog posts about power management has been merged into master before the freeze. This means: all of this goodness will be in KDE 4.8.

ALERT

If you follow my friend Stuart, you probably already know I am involved as a member of the KDE e.V. in the ALERT project, a partly EU funded technology project that aims to improve the ways in whch free software communities track bugs in software, identify trends and issues and find the right person to fix a problem (yes, copy-pasted from Stu, he’s much better than me in these kind of things 🙂 ).

If you are interested in finding out what it is, it’s your chance to meet me up at FOSDEM next February and have a beer and a chat about it: I’ll be around showcasing it, so don’t be afraid of getting in touch and ask your question(s). This project might indeed become very beneficial for KDE in the future, and we’re more than happy to clear your doubts on it, and tell you what’s coming up.

GSoC Mentor Summit

I was one of the brave souls representing KDE at last Google Summer of Code mentor summit. It has been a great experience, and it was great bringing the voice of KDE out to so many different communities and people. We also got some very interesting discussions and proposals regarding next year’s SoC and a general way for making people getting involved more easily. So, if you are a student: you have another very good reason for applying for SoC next year – or, if you are impatient, there’s Code-In waiting for you right next door. It has never been more easy (and rewarding) to get started into KDE development immediately, so don’t be shy!

That’s all

…and I think I covered pretty much everything I could. Stay tuned for more news!

~ by Dario on 10 November, 2011.