working with new coders; artists needed

over the last couple of months i've had the dinstinct privilege of working with a large number of new KDE hackers. this week a new hacker, Jaison, stepped up with some patches for KJots and will be working on that application. this is great as i really don't have time for it right now. Marc Cramdell, as i mentioned in my previous entry, got his first kicker patches into svn.

these newer people often need a bit of hand-holding and a lot of patch review, much as i did when i joined the project. it's not that they aren't good developers, it's just that KDE is a big code base. if you tuck yourself right into the middle of it, there's a fair amount of things to learn. i consider the time i am able to spend helping these new comers learn the KDE ropes a terrific investment. while many new patch contributors fade away after a week or a month, a few stick around for a good long time. i know for a fact that people i've had a hand in helping into KDE development have written a lot more code for KDE than i have when you sum it all up. probably an order of magnitude more code, in fact. so i see an hour here or an hour there of my time translating into dozens or hundreds of hours of new input into the project. this is a good thing and helps keep KDE a vital project.

i see people such as Matt Rogers and Scott Wheeler doing the same sort of thing, and this is just brilliant. this is one of the more effective ways that we grow our community of developers and keep it healthy.

of course, it's not all about developers, either ... for kicker, i need artists too =) with the new KDE artists site around the corner, or so i've heard, i'll be leveraging that to look for people who can help with the look issues around kicker and the desktop. i'm not a visual artist, i'm a coder, so i need all the help i can get there ... =)

i also snagged a new laptop via work ... nothing spectacular, but >3x faster than my old one, a display the doesn't suck and without the form factor of a boat anchor. i've been using it as a way to sneak out to the coffee shop and plunk way on the FreeNX client libraries. i've spiffied them up a bit on so i can finally do a freakin' release of my NX client, which i need to do so other people can work on it as well. i get way too board working on it by myself. i'm too social, in that sense.