It’s the first time I am involved in contributing KDE, and I think that’s very wonderful experience for me.
The first task I claimed is convert the all class members in calligra/kexi project to d-pointers. This task is not very hard to me actually. Because that the source files and classes are so many, it takes most of labors, and some experiences and ability to to cope with exceptions. I’ve been leaving c++ for almost one year time, so totally the most important thing I gained is to pick up c++ again. Further more, I don’t used to know to use d-pointers to reduce coupling, and now I learnt it, which is really cool.
Then I’ve contributed with marble-globe task. The task is about adding remote icon/image support for marble. I got known about the typical structure of a KDE programs, and I’m feeling like to program Qt, which is really powerful and handy. And then by the passion, I wrote the required KML tag writers for marble, too. These are interesting for me.
Totally speaking the greatest gain is the achievement of contributing open source projects. This is biggest open source project I’ve been involved in, since before I used to just collaborate opensource project with small groups or individuals on github before. Those hackers I met are really friendly. I’m very careless. I made a lot of mistakes, and even didn’t realize that. At those times, my mentor always explained to me patiently & gently, that made feel embarrassed when finally I knew that’s my fault. And at the time, when I met project-related problems that I can’t solve and not able to be abstracted to ask on stackoverflow, I sent emails to my mentors and they explained the reason of the problem clearly and gave me guidance to solve it. I can feel that the hackers in open source community are glad to help those beginners like me, and that’s really impressive for me.
This is the first time & will be the last that I could attend Google Code-In, but I will continue work on contributing open source projects. I love the atmosphere in open source communities and I would like to get acquainted to more hackers. Good luck.
That’s it, thanks to all.