2020 HackIllinois hackathon: after-action report

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 2:40 AM Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> wrote:
>
> 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

Really encouraging work, Nate. Especially in the US, we also need
people there to know us as well as our products. :)

Thanks for the report!

Cheers!
Aleix