Rokers on speed?

whatever happened to the rock and roll?
Originally uploaded by johnnyalive.

Paul always does sweet little graphs to show interesting stuff. Since everyone in the Amarok team felt that development really sped up in the last weeks/months I wanted some proof of that mainly to show it off 😛 and to find out where it came from. So I asked Paul to help me with that by doing what he does best. And only a few hours later he presented the results. If you haven’t read it yet you should do it now before reading the rest of my post.

Impressive, right?

So now that Paul did his part I should probably do my job and explain why this is happening 😉

There are several “sources of developers”:

• Google Summer of Code: With 6 of our 7 students (Alejandro, Casey, Daniel, Daniel, William, Peter) doing an excellent job they really help getting things done. You rock!
• Season of KDE: Teo is working on his SoC project (mass tagging) without sponsorship from Google. He is doing a great job. Two others are starting to work on another project right now. You rock!
• KDE BugSquad: Edward started triaging bugs for us during the Amarok bugday and is now starting to help with development. He already made a very impressive start. You rock!
• Oldtimers: Our core developers are doing a lot more lately. On the one hand they help new developers getting used to Amarok development and give them a hand when they have trouble with stuff like the buildsystem. On the other hand they seem to be a lot more motivated to get Amarok 2 ready for release now that we have the alpha releases out of the door and things are starting to fall into place. You rock! (But you know that right? ;-))
• Other contributors: A few new people showed up in the last few days and already presented promising results. I hope you all stick around. You rock!

So the next question is: Why are more people interested in Amarok 2 now than they were say 2 months ago. The reasons I can see are:

• With the release of KDE 4.1 it became easier to start developing on Amarok because the hurdle of compiling KDE from trunk was gone.
• With Neon a lot more people could give Amarok 2 a try without compiling it from SVN. (Which also helped non-dev team members _a lot_.)
• The release of alpha 1 and 2 made it a lot easier to try Amarok 2 with distro packages and gave the signal “We have something we think is worth testing now”.
• A lot of very positive reviews in the press.
• People actually start to understand our vision for Amarok 2 and want to help making it reality.

Last but not least: Developers are motivated by:

• Very positive reception of the alphas in the press and among users.
• A lot of bug reports that show that users are caring about what we do and want to help us improve as much as possible until the release of the final 2.0 version. Among those bug reports are a lot of junior jobs which makes it easy to get started with a small task and get used to everything.
• Actually switching to Amarok 2 as their main player without big problems.
• Development being in a very exciting phase, i.e. we left the really hard start behind us where we literally had no new blood at all for a very long time (for reasons see above) and are not yet in boring maintenance mode.
• The frameworks actually start to pay off.

It is pretty interesting to see how most of this, if not all, can also be applied to KDE 4.1. Let’s see if we can get some nice stuff put together at Akademy to prove this 🙂

Exciting times and more of them ahead of us! Now is the right time to join KDE development (and any other non-dev part of KDE of course).