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Klassrooms and Programming

Tokamak 4 has just begun, and we have a great round of introductory presentations here today.
One thing I’ll try to sneak into my introductory talk is a little status update about the Klassroom that’s currently going on at the forums. And since that may interest others out there, I’ll also write a bit about it.
I’m not a forum regular (actually I hardly ever visit forums nowadays) so I wasn’t really up to date what is going on there, except that the forums KDE look really shiny now.

I knew that porting apps for KNewStuff2 to KNewStuff3 was something for me to do at some point. Not very exciting but also not much work. I estimate that it takes me 20 minutes for each app unless it does crazy stuff with KNewStuff. (I haven’t found any app that does anything out of the usual with it though).
Now instead of porting the apps myself, I talked to our forums people (very helpful and nice they are!) and we set up a small course to help people to port the applications and thereby start getting more involved with KDE.
The actual C++ was not the focus of this course but more of a requirement for the participants. I wanted to enable people to learn about KDE infrastructure a bit. Often all that’s lacking is an invitation in order to attract new developers.
Of course it took me way longer to write texts about how to get started than doing the porting myself. That was expected of course. I don’t know if I got the level of detail right yet, I’m curious to find out.

Last Sunday the course was announced and immediately there were 9 people wanting to participate. Despite having basic C++ knowledge as requirement. Impressive. I’ll recap later how many of them finished the course, on Monday I got the first two patches, so there were two people just burning to get started with KDE development. We’re one happy bunch so far, only I’d like to get more questions – I’m not so sure if there is just enough explanatory material out there of if people are still intimidated 🙂

One patch that we were not so sure about was to add KNewStuff to Okular. In the end, after discussing this with Albert, we decided to not add it. Okular is a simple document viewer and not a book manager. So is there maybe a need for a small book management app? Well, Brian started to experiment with the idea and even started a project on gitorious. I’m very impressed so far with all participants that just got started even without me helping much.
Now I just need to review all the patches and we’ll evaluate all of this in a week or so. It’s been fun so far, maybe it would be a good idea to get more of these courses started. Interested developers should just talk to the forum staff.