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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Shortest route for a KDE devel wannabee?
From:       Martin Ellis <m.a.ellis () ncl ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2005-10-13 11:13:01
Message-ID: 200510131213.01807.m.a.ellis () ncl ! ac ! uk
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On Wed, 12 Oct 2005, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > You might be able to help at
> > small projects, with just a few hundreds or some thousand lines of code,
> > but anything as big as koffice, kdevelop, quanta and so on really needs
> > experienced developers. 

I'd also disagree with this.

On Wednesday 12 Oct 2005 23:07, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> Look at me... Didn't know C++, didn't know C -- I was just a Visual Basic
> hacker who had gotten uppity through working with Java. And I found this
> app, it didn't do much anything yet, but well, it couldn't be hard,

Likewise, with the exception of fixing a single bug in Kopete, KOffice was my 
first venture into Qt or KDE development.  And I would have described myself 
as "reasonably comfortable with C++ [but] pretty new to qt and the kde-libs" 
too.

For example, for writing a database driver, or spreadsheet plugin or whatever, 
or presumably a filter, you simply don't need to understand the entire 
application before you start coding:  there are still parts of Kexi that I 
haven't ventured into.

(My first KOffice contributions were writing API docs and rewriting the Kexi  
MySQL driver)

> The important thing is: not being afraid to ask stupid questions,
> not being afraid of looking stupid, not being afraid to write stupid,
> code that works.

For that reason, I really like the "Most embarrassing moment" question in
the more recent "People Behind KDE interviews": http://www.kde.nl/people/ - 
nice to hear that some of the more well-known KDE hackers have done some silly 
things too!   :o)

Martin
 
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