Hello everybody, everybody hello.

[Frank Osterfeld]

On Friday 07 October 2005 10:49, Amine Chadly wrote:
> Hi !
> I am totally new to Kde development, and to QT development.
> I have some experience in c++, java, python, and consider myself as a
> newbie++. I would like to join the team of the shiny happy people working
> on kde. Is there any area where I could be useful ?

Hi Amine, welcome to KDE!

There are many ways to contribute to KDE, documentation, translations, PR, web 
presence, usability testing, etc. pp... So if have abilities in one of these 
areas, your help is welcome. Coding is by far not the only way to contribute.

But as you emphasized on the coding part (and that is what I do), I will 
continue on that:

One way to learn Qt and KDE coding is tutorials:

http://www.digitalfanatics.org/projects/qt_tutorial/
http://developer.kde.org/
http://doc.trolltech.com

Qt has good documentation, and as it is the base of KDE, it would make sense 
to start with some Qt coding. 
Also check kdevelop - there are some useful templates that help avoid the 
hassle one can run into when setting up the build system etc. 

If "Hello World" programs are not your thing and you want to start to work on 
"real-world" code right away, you e.g. can do bug hunting. The problem is, 
all but the very simple applications probably need some experience with 
Qt/KDE to find a) the cause of a bug and b) to fix it "properly". 
On the other hand, reading code from a well-written application (of course you 
can have bad luck and run into bad code ;-) ) might help learning quickly 
about what are good practices in KDE development and how a KDE application is 
usually structured. So you don't have reinvent the wheel to solve things that 
have been solved 1000 times before, and where a good solution already exists 
in kdelibs one can reuse.

Another way, the way I took, is to find a small application on kde-apps.org 
that you like but that is still in a premature state. Being small, the 
application is easier to understand than let's say, KMail. There are most 
likely low-hanging fruits like adding small features, fixing crashes, or 
polishing the GUI, that can be solved by a newbie. You get immediate 
feedback/reward if the bug fix/feature works and is included, and you might 
show up in the About dialog ;-).

Of course you can do all these things in parallel, reading tutorials and apply 
your new knowledge to an existing project. More infos for hackers in spe can 
be found at [1].

Regards,

Frank

[1] http://quality.kde.org/develop/howto/howtohack.php
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-quality/attachments/20051007/8060c5ff/attachment.pgp