Hi there! I’m very excited to share that my proposal to work on improving MMS support to the KDE-Connect’s SMS app has been accepted into GSoC 2020. I’m very excited to work on this project. The official coding will begin 1st June and will end on 24th august. To know more about GSoC and KDE click on the given below links.

GSoC is an open-source program hosted by google in which accpted students from all over the world works on an open source project with the assigned mentor for three months. GSoC

Hi everyone! It’s been so long since I started this site, back in July 2017. It’s been mostly to showcase my open source work and have a place for potential business contacts, and I’ve never ever blogged a bit because long prose is kind of difficult for me. (Also, I’m very fearful of our dear internet trolls.)

Today, I’m finally getting out of my shell. I’ve been selected as a participant for Google Summer of Code 2020, working with KDE on the Krita painting suite.

Looking back on my logs, it was in October 2016 (shortly before my graduation) that its maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt, and Pepper & Carrot’s author, David Revoy, welcomed me with open arms to the FOSS world. In the four years that passed, I’ve learnt a lot: graduated, started my MSc, almost finished it, and landed my first job in the industry. I can’t express how deeply thankful I am for their help and advice, so the only way I could think of returning the favor was to tackle a Big Thing in Krita.

Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects.

Google Summer of Code is the annual project funded by Google where they pay student developers to get involved in open-source development by working on different defined tasks.

We are very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:

Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD
Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing
Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally
Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD
Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing
Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment
Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite

The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.

I’m really excited to announce that my proposal for participating in GSoC 2020 with DigiKam has been accepted! I would like to thank the developers for considering me worthy of this opportunity.

I came to know about KDE during December 2019, when Season of KDE was announced. Even though my proposals for SoK were rejected, I’m glad I didn’t lose hope! I spent the months of January and February getting used to compiling from source, and the GitLab workflow. I learnt many lessons along the way, such as how copy pasting any command you find on StackOverflow into your terminal, can sometimes be disastrous.

It has been over a year since I made my first contribution for KDE and I truly loved every bit of it since then. It all started from October 2018 when I was trying to get habitual of using Linux as it is good for development but ended up in really hating it, due to its Desktop environment. Then, I tried KDE plasma and fell in love with it. I began exploring various KDE projects and really loved the work that the community is doing. I really wanted to be a part of it.

I tried out using Elisa and was really mesmerised by its beautiful user interface. I then began contributing to the same project and then started working for Krita.

I applied for GSoC 2019, but was rejected due to lack of slots for the organisation. Though I was sad, I trusted my mentor's decision and I made into the program this year.

Hello everyone, I am Deepak Kumar a 3rd-year undergraduate student pursuing B.E in Information Technology from India.

I am happy to share that I have finally cracked Google Summer of Code this year. My project titled “Adding Multiple Datasets to several Activities” has been selected by KDE GCompris organization.

I have been contributing to the GCompris project from the past year. The day when I started contributing to GCompris I was new to open-source. GCompris was the first organization I started to contribute in the field of open-source. I took up the basic issues initially and gradually when I was enough comfortable with the codebase I worked on resolving many issues, adding features to this awesome project. I have also completed Season of KDE 2020 on which I have worked on implementing multiple datasets to few activities. I think that I was the best candidate for this project because I am well familiar with the codebase, worked on successfully implementing multiple datasets to a few activities and an active contributor for this project.

The selected student is Alejandro Dominguez (aledomu), that is collaborating with Fractal since the Seville Hackfest in December 2018, doing a great work in the backend. Alejandro is young developer with a lot of energy and ideas, so it's great to have this kind of people working on GNOME.

I've not spend much time lately developing Fractal, the time and energy is limited, but I'll try to use this GSoC mentorship to go back to the active Fractal development. My objective during this summer will be to stabilize, fix bugs and improve the performance and create a new release at the end of the GSoC, because we've a lot of new functionality in master, but I didn't spend the time to do the release.

The google summer of code is a great opportunity for free software, it give us a full time working student, during three months, working on free software, so it's really appreciated in a community where a lot of work is volunteer work.

Krita is my first interaction with the open source community and the experience has been truly spectacular. The community of developers and artists around Krita is very warm and friendly. They answer the dumbest of your questions. Starting from helping me build Krita to getting my GSoC proposal ready, they were always helpful. I feel like I have been nurtured by this community to have a more open minded perspective. I have seen how patiently they answer questions that are asked by me and others, no matter how stupid it may sound, and this has made me kinder to people. I am no more the cold fish that I used to be, the warmth is changing me. Krita has enabled me to use my skills to solve problems that would help a lot of people. The effect of open source is not only limited to my development skills, it has spilled over to other parts of my life as well.

On the more technical side, I have become more confident with multiple files, classes and functions that interact with each other in complex manner. I have become better at finding and understanding the code that affects the relevant problem. I have learned the value of good documentation and good comments. The feeling of gratitude towards the developer when trying to understand a piece of code and finding a relevant comment is immense.(Note to self: write good comments). I have a lot to learn, and after contributing to Krita I have gained a new confidence in my ability to learn.

I have been selected to participate in GSoC 2020 to work on a Storyboard docker for Krita. I would be mentored by Agata Cacko, Boudewijn Rempt and Scott Petrovic. This project would aim to build a storyboard docker that would let animators and storyboarders create a storyboard easily and quickly. They would also be able to export the storyboard in commonly used formats. I look forward to working with my mentors and the community to complete this project.

Part 1 - I am blessed to announce that I have been selected for Google Summer of Codes 2020 with GCompris! I would really like to thank my mentors for giving me this opportunity. So yeah, I am really excited to begin one more journey with Gcompris after successfully completing SoK this year. loads of fun and a very productive summer is waiting for me ahead. I am ready to grasp it with both hands. I would say the key factor for my selection in GSoC is my involvement with community. I have been contributing since last December, I was active on IRC, discussing stuffs and also submitted my proposal for reviews, quite early which gave a decent amount of time to mentors to review it properly and suggest appropriate changes. Stay tuned, I will share my goals and further journey with Gcompis in upcoming blogs.

We are so grateful to the GSoC program for offering this opportunity to the KDE Community and our students. By the end of the summer, we hope that each of these students will be a confident KDE Developer, happy with their summer of work, and looking forward to supporting their code and newfound friends far into the future.

Krita is KDE’s professional free and open source painting program. The Krita team will mentor four students this year: L. E. Segovia will work on adding dynamic fill layers, Saurabh Kumar will implement a storyboard feature, Sharaf Zaman will bring SVG Mesh Gradients to Krita and Ashwin Dhakaita will integrate the MyPaint brush engine.

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite which includes a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. This year GCompris will have two students with Deepak Kumar adding multiple datasets to several activities and Shubham Mishra will complete the multiple dataset task.

digiKam is KDE’s professional photo management software. This year digiKam will be mentoring two students: Nghia Duong will bring DNN based face recognition improvements to the app and R Kartik will make improvements to the face management workflow.

After an anxious month, I am writing a Krita Weekly again and probably this would be my last one too, though I hope not. Let’s start by talking about bugs. Unlike the trend going about the last couple of months, the numbers have taken a serious dip. The net change in the number of bugs was 40 last week and is pretty obvious from the graph. I will just hope that this continues so that finally we can have the magical number 0.

[...]

Saurabh, a new contributor would be working on adding storyboard support to Krita. Psst, you can give the credit of popping in the idea to me btw, I needed a drawing software to create pdf slides and tada. Last but not the least Ashwin will be working on supporting MyPaint’s brush engine inside Krita.

I would have been working on SVG flowing-text too, but got a job, will be starting next Monday so I had to withdraw from GSoC. And regularly blogging with a full-time job while not impossible would cramp my schedule, so I won’t promise any Krita Weeklies from now on. :wq for now.

Google has published the list of students accepted in the Google Summer of Code program. The accepted students work on open-source software. Pending monthly evaluations, the students receive a stipend from Google. Like last year, we’re mentoring three students!

[...]

Vivek R will implement face/object tracking and blurring. A new GStreamer plugin will allow tracking a specified region in the video using OpenCV. The obtained tracking information is presented to the user to be reviewed and adjusted in a new UI Perspective. The user can apply the adjusted positions to a blur effect applied to the clip.

A student is allowed to participate in GSoC only twice in a lifetime. I’m thinking they chose this rule as an “only once in a lifetime” type of rule would have sounded too dramatic.

Humor aside, I have actually learned from a colleague over at university that Google implemented this rule because veteran students would keep returning every year taking most of the slots and thus leaving very little room for newcomers to make an entrance. Considering I’m a returning student myself, I can imagine that at the time I could have very easily been part of the problem...

It’s been a little over six months since my last blog post. It’s not like nothing happened since; I’ve just not got used to this yet.

As Ondřej Holý has previously blogged, the (now old) news are that he has invited me to be co-maintainer of the Files app. I was hesitant at first. I’m not sure if it was what’s called imposter syndrome, but I did worry I was not qualified to be maintainer, as I have no formal education on software engineering. I’ve started to overcome my doubts while attending GUADEC 2019, thanks to everyone who encouraged me, and I’ve finally cleared them thanks to Ondřej’s invitation and support. Now I’m happy to have accepted the challenge.

Hello everyone! I’m Neville and I’m an all-things-computer enthusiast. And this is my my blog where I tell the tales of my journey into open source!!

I’ve always been interested to be part of the open source community and to contribute to the countless cool projects. Now that I’ve started contributing to open source projects it feels very exciting to be part of it! The community is very nice and helpful. And I feel like I’m learning a lot in the process. And there’s a whole journey ahead me.

I will be working on GNOME Games. It’s a video game launcher + emulator for several video game platforms. My work is to implement game collections which will allow users to create, view and manage user creatable and auto generatable collection of games (like albums in photo viewers). Games is mostly written in Vala, and is packaged as flatpak. You can get it from here.

Hi to the people of planet GNOME!

Should I start with a deep introduction? Not sure! Okay, let me start from my first time with Linux. I installed my first Linux when I was around 17, It was OpenSUSE. I just burned iso and booted, HAHAHA It was a magnetic disk era. After some years I was getting deep into Linux. I consider Linux as an Icecream. Lots of flavors to eat. Eat whatever you like. Or make your own flavor. 4-5 years ago I was jumping over multiple distros. I tried multiple linux distros. But now I'm settled on a custom build Debian distro. My first encounter with GNOME was on Fedora. I still love Fedora. But Debian is ultra-fast with only selected packages and easy to make its flavor. This is my short Linux story.

This year I'm selected into GSOC. Yay. well, the fun part is Its GNOME. I applied in only one Org. from the list, cause It was GNOME or nothing.

I was connected to one of my mentor month before GSOC start. He told me to fix some newcomers' issues on GitLab. That was my first contribution to GNOME.

Hi! Today, I am bringing some good news. The Google Summer of Code 2020 results were announced and I was accepted as a student!

I am excited and grateful for this opportunity that KDE community has given to me and I will focus to do an excellent work during this project.

I submitted a project proposal to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). As I am curious about the DRM subsystem and have already started to work in contributing to it, I was looking for an organization that supports this subsystem. So, I applied to the X.Org foundation and proposed a project to Improve VKMS using IGT GPU Tools. Luckily, in May 4th, I received a e-mail from GSoC announcing that I was accepted! Happy happy happy!

Observing a conversation in #dri-devel channel, I realized that my project was the only one accepted on X.Org. WoW! I have no idea why the organization has only one intern this year, and even more, that this is me! Imediately after I received the result, Trevor Woerner congratulated me and kindly announced my project on his Twitter profile! It was fun to know that he enjoyed the things that I randomly posted in my blog, and was so nice to see that he read what I wrote!

Greetings to all. I hope everyone is safe in these crucial times when the true spirit of humanity is tested, and we help those who are not as fortunate as us.

I am grateful to be safe at home, however, this is not the case for many who are stranded in these difficult times.

It’s been 10 days since the GSoC result was announced and it’s still beyond belief that I am selected for GSoC.

This Month is for community bonding and fortunately I already have quite good bonding with mentors. I am also utilising this time in learning some more git and QML and now I am planning to start reading code for all the activities on which I have to work this summer. So, I might disturb mentors a bit more from now .

GCompris has been working on adding multiple datasets to activities for a long time and in this GSoC, I am taking forward my SoK work and adding multiple datasets to some more activities.

Akonadi is the backend framework providing APIs for storage and retrieval of the user’s personal info such as contacts, email and calendar. These APIs are used by applications like Kontact, Kmail, KAddressBook and other apps in the KDE PIM suite. Akonadi also allows one to sync this data via a number of services like Google, Microsoft Exchange, DAV servers and many others.

My project is to add to this list a secure, end-to-end encrypted, FLOSS sync solution for contacts, calendars and tasks, called EteSync. EteSync clients are available for Android, iOS, the desktop (Cal/CardDAV bridge) and the web, and a Thunderbird plugin is in the works. The server too is open-source and can be self-hosted. As mentioned, EteSync utilizes end-to-end encryption, hence giving users the benefit of truly owning their data and respecting their privacy.

As currently, the GSoC community bonding period is going on. I have interacted with my mentors about the design of the datasets which I am going to implement for the memory activities. As I am going to implement multiple datasets to about 11 activities so I have created a separate task on the phabricator for each of them. I have also finalized the description of the multiple datasets of few activities as Enumeration memory game Activity, Addition memory game activity, Subtraction memory game activity, and the Multiplication memory game activity. The main goal of all the memory game activities is to practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. To make the Enumeration memory game more rich I also planned to add configurations to choose between different quantity representations as choose between dots, numbers, dices, etc.

I’m very happy to announce that my proposal for GSoC for The GNOME git client app “gitg” got accepted.

[....]

I’m in my senior year in my College, pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and Software Systems at Ain Shams University, So I saw this as a great opportunity to get more experience with the help of a mentor and an awesome community to enhance my skills, while also helping in improving, making an impact to and extending software I really like and appreciate it’s working flow, simplicity, and elegance like GNOME.

So I began this year by studying and learning more about the technologies used to develop GNOME Software e.g. GObject, Glib, etc. Then around February I saw the ideas list at GNOME website and I was really interested in gitg ideas, So I contacted gitg IRC channel, talked with the Project Maintainer (Alberto Fanjul, “albfan” on IRC) and told him that I’m interested, he presented me with a newcomers’ issue and I made a MR for it. Then I created a pet project just to play around more with libgit2-glib library, which is a wrapper for the libgit2 APIs.

Seeing my colleagues applying for GSoC this year, I started my search and made some contributions to the Gnome’s projects. So I put an application for one of the Gnome’s projects (only one application, in case you were wondering). On the 4th of May 23:45 IST, I received the acceptance email from GSoC community (Yay!).

The project I applied to is libhandy (a library of GUI widgets for phones). In there I’ll be working on implementing a new widget (more description here).

I always saw this incomplete, half written draft about my experience applying to Outreachy internship, in my folder. At first I thought I should just delete it because I’m already done with the internship & I’ve already written my wrap-up post describing a little about my experience. But then I just couldn’t do it only.

So, today, I gave it an another reading, finally added the left overs, and decided to post it (more for my-own-self). Because now I know Outreachy was once-in-a-lifetime experience for me. And I’m never going to feel the same way how I felt during the first week of my outreachy internship.

Here is what I wrote some 5 months back, with a little more of what I added today. Now that I have added experience from the time after I finished the internship too, it has some proper more reliable answers I guess.

I have started working on my project earlier due to the uncertain times that we find ourselves in. Hence this is Week -1 report, a week earlier than the official start of coding period. This week corresponds to Week 1 of the planned timeline.

This week was easier than expected. Adding the storyboard docker to Krita’s plugin system was very easy, thanks to the numerous dockers already implemented. Implementing outer GUI was tougher than that, but it was easy on absolute terms. The GUI consists of four QToolButtons namely Export, Comment, Lock(Icon), Arrange(Icon) and a QTableView(which will be promoted to a custom view). Three of these buttons Export, Comment and Arrange have a menu associated with them. Lock is a toggle button.

Kdenlive’s Titler Tool rewrite began with GSoC 2019 and now I am happy to announce that we have an MLT producer which can play .qml files with animations! The producer is being now integrated in Kdenlive.

Last week, as part of my GSoC Project with DigiKam, I implemented a new feature to effectively Ignore faces. The feature had been requested multiple times, and was in-fact necessitated due to the power of DigiKam’s Facial Recognition Algorithm.

DigiKam will often detect and then try to recognize faces in photos that the user perhaps doesn’t recognize himself! With the implementation of this new feature, the user could just mark such faces as Ignored. Faces marked as Ignored will not be detected by the Face Detection process in the future, nor will they be considered during the recognition process.

Only Unknown Faces are allowed to be marked as Ignored, this stems from the logic that if you confirmed a face, i.e. gave it a name, then it is someone you know, and hence marking them as Ignored doesn’t really make sense.