Back in the days when the company I worked for announced that it would completely shut down in less than 2 months, I felt somewhat free. You see, around that time I was already thinking about what I wanted to be my professional future and that didn't match what I was doing. As I said in a previous post, I really liked that company, so deciding what to do was really hard. So when the shutdown was announced there was no other option: I had to pursue my dreams.
What drems were those? To work in free software. Not only with free software, as I already did in that job (I was the sysadmin), but coding, creating, fixing, twisting free software. Which prject? KDE, of course. It's one of the most influencing free software for me, one of the ones I most admire, and one of the ones I most closely followed since I knew it (I think the only other one is Debian).
I followed the KDE1.x series upgrading from on version to another of Mandriva, and when KDE2.x started appearing in CVS I already was riding Debian. Compiling KDE once a week was a trademark of mine in my local free software group, everybody knew me for being a KDE fan and all. Later came KDE3.x and I kept compiling, until it was so mature that it didn't gave me the kicks anymore. Also I was already getting some serious works, so I couldn't afford to loose my desktop because I had a compile error or everything just crashed (not that it happened very often, I just couldn't risk it), like the problem I had just before giving a presentation about KDE more than 5 years ago.
And almost never in all those years (8, maybe? no, a little over 9 years! I made my firt post to [kde-devel] in Nov 1999!) I added a single line of code. I remember hacking a couple of features in KDE2.something, and even mentioned them in [kde-devel], but never pushed them enough, I guess. Until last month.
I joined #kde-devel, just to hang around, on
November 2008. On the 8th, DanielW mentioned he had problem with a
EINTR error. He though it was Soprano, but after 40 minutes of
digging I found the culprit, and 3 more hours until I was really
sure and developed a solution, which was not very clean, and 2 more
hours of hacking until I was pleased with the patch and DanielW
said it was fixed. Later, in the next day, DanielW and me decided
to file the patch. On Nov 10th he added the patch to the
patches dir in qt-copy and my first ever
contibution to KDE, and no less that fixing QT! I just couldn't
stop doing backflips in my office (well, not actually doing them,
I'm not in that good shape, just felt like it)!
Unluckly that patch lacked a return somewhere, so
the next day half of the KDE developers were left with no DNS
resolution (or any network, for that matter). aseigo found that my
patch was the culprit and disabled it, so all the happyness I still
had about that patch turned into embarrasment. Later that day I
wrote a much better patch that not only fixed that, but also
refactored some code.
Fortunately that didn't make me dissapear. I kept helping here and there, specially in Plasma, more specifically in those plasmoids I already used and that already were nagging me to fix this or code that feature. Sebastian Kügler help me twice with my patches, once for the digital clock, making it properly draw the date and/or timezone bellow in horizontal panels, and once for the battery plasmoid, making it show the remaining time until either the battery runs out or the battery gets fully recharged, depending on the AC was plugged or not; the latter was a feature I though of.
So, what happened is that he told me to apply for a svn account, which I almost promptly did (there was a hiatus forced by my vacations; not that I missed hacking :) and today I completed hopping all the hops and got my new shiny svn account. I spent the rest of the evening compiling KDE4 again and writing this post.
Why did I wrtite it? Not only because I'm really proud of it, but because I wanted to stress two things: that the KDE community is really welcoming when you express your intentions to help, and that getting involved into it is really simple: you just need to want it to happen and to actually start doing it. The latter was something I never realized until I made it happen.
But this is just the begining. As I said before I would really like to get paid to help in KDE. The job offer I was eyeing has just been covered, but there will be plenty of opportunities, and I'm still a newbie. Now I'll just keep helping in whatever I like to, and let's see what the future brings. And sebas, I really appreciate your help.