Welcome students

[Piotr Szymański]

Hello,
I'm one of the last year's soc coders, this year my proposition was
rejected, but apart from me actually not being sad (a vacation once in
3 years), there are good news.

Before I write sth related to everyone's projects I want to say that
Evince got two SummerOfCode propositions accepted - for annotations
support and for forms support. KPDF/oKular - the project I was doing
last year (this is the good news) got one about commenting tools for
oKular, I guess annotation related since I have not see the
description.

I already talked a lot with the Evince folks, including the student
working on annotations support, I want the work of the three students
to be somehow related so we can come up with somethin unified and
compatible between oKular and Evince. I hope with Albert's (the KDE
mentor working with the oKular-soc student) help we can end up with
something really extraordinary in the opensource - realising a
multiproject goal with both sides getting goodies.

As for all students, congratulations. I will allow myself to give you
a bunch of pointers:

1. For those of you that work on existing projects like kdepim,
kopete, oKular etc. Please reserve yourself at least 3 weeks on
getting into the codebase. Most of the apps in KDE have very few
documentation that would introduce the new developers into how the app
is thought out. oKular has some introductory documentation but it is
still not what I'd call a new developer - friendly situation. 3 weeks
should be ok. If you stop at a point and can't understand sth in the
codebase or in anything project related, read the second pointer.

2. Remember about talking with your mentors and using IRC as much as
you can. Many people on IRC are very knowledgable about different
project in KDE. Last year I would never finish oKular;s chm backend if
it was not for Maksim Orlovich and his super council on how KHTMLPart
works.

3. Take a while (a day or two) before implementing a concept and try
to imagine how it will be designed, draw schemas on the paper etc -
this is really useful and having a good class on paper saves weeks of
coding.

4. Write documentation, write what you learned while getting into the
codebase, this is very useful for future developers and belive me it
will help you understand the codebase and finish your project faster.
Many projects need it badly like kopete, kmail, kdevelop.

Document your code too ! Really, writing documentation is not 'time
wasted instead of coding' it is on the contrary - ' time saved in the
future coding'. Writing your thinking down helps you organise your
code before it is written too, not to mention finding a lot of bugs.

5. Sleep well. I remember many nights without sleep last holidays
because the ghostscript developers (I needed to understand Ghostscript
code, painful) were from australia while I am from europe so around 4
am we started talking sessions. But if you don't have such problems -
sleep, coding while being sleepy is one of the worst things you can
do.

6. Do not be afraid to learn how to debug kde apps instead of putting
millions of kdWarning() instances that print every function name. It
might take a day or two, will save more then a week.

Have a nice summer everyone, hope you stay with us after the SoC.
-- 
Piotr Szymański
niedakh at gmail.com