KDE Itinerary Update and Sam Thursfield's (GNOME) Update
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OSM Hack Weekend September 2023
Just two weeks after the OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe I found myself at yet another OSM Hack Weekend, in Berlin hosted by Wikimedia Germany. This time with a bit more focus on infrastructure and integration/interoperability topics for me, rather than features immediately visible in KDE Itinerary.
OSM editor integration
When working on the indoor map renderer for KDE Itinerary...
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Sam Thursfield: Status update, 20/10/2023
This month I had the pleasure to visit Manchester and Wales for a couple of weeks. I caught the last of the summer before the crazy climate-crisis storms of October began and everywhere started flooding.
I also just came back from A Coruña where I attended the excellently organised X.org Developers Conference. Thankfully there were no talks about X.Org, but we did talk a lot about managing hardware test rigs. This is a problem that Mesa 3D developers are particularly interested in, given the nature of that project, and it’s increasingly relevant for GNOME as well. It was also great to catch up with some folk I hadn’t seen since before the Great Plague or who I’d never even met in real life before.
Outreachy
I decided that the GNOME openQA tests were a good candidate for running an Outreachy internship. Initially I thought I would run a project to test GNOME with mobile form factor. After chatting to Sonny we came up with a much more interesting plan which helped me to re-evaluate my whole approach to these kinds of internships.
I have been involved in Google Summer of Code in the past, once as an intern and once or twice as a mentor. I think in all cases it’s been useful for the intern, and we have had some great interns, but it’s not always super useful for the project.
The difficulty is: allocating a task that is exactly 3 months long is quite difficult, and the task ends up being something that an experienced developer might do in a week, which you arbitrarily draw out to 3 months and turn into a teaching opportunity. I am yet to mentor someone who has later become a long-term contributor to the same project. Parcelling out appropriate tasks in active project is a headache – for example, once an applicant submitted a merge requst during the application period that already implemented a big part of one project.