What made you step and and decide to contribute to KDE?
- Besides enjoying the DE, it appeared to be a community that was making smart decisions (2017 Goals for example) and was growing.
What was your point of entry to KDE?
- Nate's blog posts basically, and Nate himself.
In what area are you contributing to (development, translation, documentation etc.)?
- Right now a mix of development and bug triaging, with maybe documentation later.
How did you decide where to contribute?
- I decided to work in areas that will help in the 2017 Goals. I like the productivity goal to polish the DE, and I like the onboarding goal to make the project easier to join. Helping a long-time FLOSS project grow is something I'd like to do. Right now my development efforts are small patches, since I'm not much of a programmer right now. Just things I know I can handle. So I'm now focusing on bug triaging, to hopefully assist those who do know how to program well.
What steps did you follow to get involved?
- I started out talking with Nate, he helped me through the 1-2-3 of getting signed up with my various accounts and a dev evironment. He and Henrik recommended some Phabricator Tasks and bugs/feature requests to tackle. Mostly icon fixes, menu edits, stuff like that. From there, I just spent time browsing randomly through Phabricator, finding Tasks and Projects that were interesting. Watching the Activity feed on the right is also helpful to see what cool things are happening and might be worth looking at to offer comments or assistance.
What did you enjoy most in the process of joining KDE?
- The friendliness of everyone, and the ease of joining. There were no trials or tests to go through.
What where the difficulties you came across?
- The introductory process of reading Wiki pages. Even with the improvements to Get Involved, there is no easy 1-2-3, here is how you get started. For example, to get started as a developer, you are pointed to an article, which has lots of information, sure, but is not a set procedure really. I was looking for something like:
- Create a Bugzilla account, do this.
- Create a KDE Identity account, do this.
- Create a Phabricator account, do this.
- Get your dev environment setup, follow these steps.
- Pull down this Git repo (say, a tutorial repo), create a branch
- Edit this file, commit it, and create a diff via Arcanist.
- Once approved, land your commit like this.
- You have now followed the basic process and can contribute!