2020 HackIllinois hackathon: after-action report

[Nate Graham]

Greetings KDE friends!

This weekend I attended the 2020 HackIllinois event in Champaign-Urbana 
as a FOSS mentor, representing KDE. I'd like to present my after-action 
report:



*Overview*

First the good news: the KDE team won!

My students reported that the judges were impressed with their results, 
excitement, and passion, and the fact that one of the submitted patches 
(https://invent.kde.org/kde/konsole/-/merge_requests/68) has already 
been merged.

My students principally worked on building a visualizer for plasma-pa's 
microphone audio input level 
(https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=411563) and managed to put 
together a pretty decent proof-of-concept: 
https://phabricator.kde.org/F8146046 (code is available at 
https://github.com/NSLeung/KDE-Neon-HackIllinois2020/commits/joey_branch). 
The code is not in a merge-worthy state, but could definitely get there 
eventually.

They also submitted some nice smaller patches: the aforementioned 
Konsole fix, and one for Dolphin too: 
https://phabricator.kde.org/D27757. They also made a thorough 
investigation of a significant Yakuake issue that has been affecting two 
of them: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389448.

Two of the students in particular seem quite eager to continue their 
contributions.



*Promo & social observations:*

Nobody had an unkind or negative word for KDE. People who had heard of 
us really seemed to love us.

The other FOSS mentors at the event who I talked to had all heard of KDE 
and some had used Plasma in the past or still do. While most of the 
students I talked to had never heard of KDE, most of the ones who had 
were already using a Plasma-based distro (mostly KDE Neon, with some 
Manjaro)! Several GNOME-using students were impressed by what they saw 
and eager to help out, and the students already using KDE software were 
super duper enthusiastic. Most had never filed any bug reports or 
submitted patches, but eagerly jumped into this. They did not find the 
process of doing so especially difficult, so I suspect that a lack of 
outreach was principally what had kept them from doing so before.

Students were especially impressed with Yakuake, the embedded terminals 
in Dolphin and Kate, and Plasma itself. They all thought it was very 
attractive and polished-looking.



*Onboarding & technical observations:*

Overall, the process of setting up a KDE development environment from 
scratch was not a major pain point, especially for the Linux-using 
students. However a number of build failures took a lot of time to 
investigate and teach people how to work around: 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418328, 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418330, 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418331, 
https://phabricator.kde.org/D10041. Please help to keep the master 
branches of your projects compilable with default CMake settings, common 
compilers, and easily installable dependencies, everyone! :)

The students using Apple laptops had to set up their development 
environments in virtual machines due to a lack of macOS support in our 
current developer tooling and documentation. I had them install Neon 
Developer Edition, which worked fine overall, but it occurred to me that 
this edition would be more useful for its stated purpose if it shipped 
with a pre-generated .kdesrc-buildrc config file, plus kdesrc-build 
itself and all necessary dependencies from 
https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source/Install_the_dependencies#KDE_neon.2C_Debian.2C_Ubuntu.2C_Kubuntu. 
These enhancements would have yielded been significant time savings for 
my VM-using students.



*Hardware observations:*

 From my observations, at least 70% of the students attending the event 
were using Apple hardware running macOS. Most of the remaining students 
were using non-Apple hardware running some flavor of Linux, about a 
60/40 mix of Plasma and GNOME, respectively. I did not see a single 
student using a PC running any version of Windows.



Overall it felt like a worthwhile endeavor! Now time for some sleep...

Nate