Since this blog is starting after the beginning of my contributions to KDE, the first few regular posts will be explaining my prior contributions, before moving into the present.

Continuity, right?



I’d also like to outline how I got involved in development, as an entry-level/non-programmer. I hope this will be helpful for those interested in helping, but unsure how to go about doing something useful.

I was introduced to the idea of developing for KDE by Nate Graham and his Usability & Productivity goal. I was immediately drawn to the idea of polishing the applications, like I stated in my first post. But how do I get started? I mean, besides the technical stuff. How do I find something easy to work on? I’m not a programmer by trade, so while we do have the Junior Jobs, a lot of those seemed out of my reach. So what to do?

One of the Usability & Productivity posts from Nate mentioned icons being added to the menus in an app. I looked at the linked code that was changed, and noticed how simple it was! I can do that! So I searched through the Junior Jobs, and Phabricator (KDE’s development and code review platform) for applications that needed some icons added to their menu. I found some tasks, and set to work:

Check out the screenshots in those links! Here is an example:

It really makes the app look nicer, right? If you scroll down in those pages and look at the code changes, you will see they are basically simple one-liners that are copy/pasted from elsewhere, with a different icon name. Easy!

You could help do easy tasks like this too!

Visit KDE’s Get Involved page for more information, or contact me!