KDE mentored a lot of students during Google Code-in and I asked some of them to write about their experience.
Areke writes:
When I first heard about the Google Code In, I was riled up with anticipation. I waited anxiously until midnight of November 21 so I could get started on a task, as this was my first year participating. When the time came, I quickly became disappointed because Melange had quite a few bugs and it was impossible to actually start a task. Well, that might not have been the case for everyone, but it was for me. After about an hour of frustration, I went to sleep hoping to find a task first thing in the morning.
Many days went by and I started completing some tasks. After about five tasks, I started one for KDE. The task was to create a donations landing page to increase the amount of donations they get. After claiming the task, I immediately went on IRC to ask my mentor how to get started. I was given editing access to a blank page and began to code away.
I had gotten the basic layout down and now it was time to fix some issues. I needed to clean the page up a bit because there were a few parts that didn’t look so good. I started to have problems. Every time I tried to fix something, another problem came up. More and more frustration started building inside of me so I decided to take a break.
When I came back to it, I found that I was able to resolve the issues very quickly and was appalled by how simple the solution was. I submitted the URL to my work and waited for a response. I was bummed out when I was told to fix some things, but it was no problem. They were easy fixes and I was soon on my way to my seventh task.
Working with KDE hasn’t just widened my knowledge of programming, it also taught me some important values. Working with KDE has taught me how important it is to have patience, but if I ever feel discouraged or frustrated, I should take a break and come back to what I was doing later. This is something that I feel is very important in life, and now I am very glad that I worked with KDE.
Radoslav writes:
Hi,
My name is Radoslav, I am from Bulgaria and it is my first apperance in Google Code-in. It all started when my teacher, who is also my cousin, gave us homework to make at least two tasks. A completed my first task which was to check if old KMail bug reports are still valid, which was easy and I finished it for no time. Afer that I had to make a Team Presentation of the Amarok developers team. Now I know who is behind it. And then I completed two more tasks form KDE. One was to make a research and to give some ideas which KDE apps could be ported to work on Plasma Active which once more made me think that KDE developers are doing some crazy stuff 🙂 The other task was to make a research how to understand the KDE users and my mentor was Carl Symons and he helped me a lot with the task.It was more like a team work: I write and he gives he second opinion on the problem. My task was to make five different research methods for understanding the KDE users, I had to search and say for every method what are the pros and what are the cons. It was a hard task and some kind of important for everybody. The task was completed and when the actual research I hope I will be a part of it too :). I met some other very interesting people and I see that KDE is not a community but a family and I want someday to be part of a family like that. 🙂