10 years a KDE Developer

Exactly today 10 years ago, I officially became a KDE Developer, after receiving the following mail:

Hi Tobias,

Your account has now been converted to a developer account.
The username for SVN is "tleupold". Please find instructions attached.

Thanks,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin

Ben Cooksley is still KDE's Sysadmin btw :-)

I started working on KPhotoAlbum some time back in April 2014. I had no clue about C++, but I thought one should be able to tag areas on photos. I had no clue about how to add this either, but I decided to at least do anything about this. So I cloned the KPA code from GitHub (which actually only was a mirror of the official repo, but I didn't kew this either) and messed with the code. It was my first attempt to work with a compiled language at all.

After a lot of trial and error, I managed to add a checkbox saying "tags for this category can be positioned" or such, and I also managed to make the setting persistent, by looking how this was done with other options.

Being quite happy with that, I filed a merge request, only stating that I managed to add an option, and maybe someone would think this was a nice idea. Well, and this became an actual milestone in my "Open Source Carreer": Johannes Zarl-Zierl, then one of KPA's devs, now the project maintainer, took me under his wings and effectively teached my how to code C++, as an outstanding coach with angelic patience.

After all, I managed to implement the "tagged areas", with a lot of help, but still. It was added to KPA by Johannes and is still part of KPA today. The first portion of code commited to KPA (or the KDE project as such), should be the commit Navigation in the Viewer should be possible as in Gwenview (Backspace = previous image), authored by me and comitted by Johannes back then on June 21, 2014. My first "real own" commit most probably was Fixed localized category names for new databases created with a locale set on July 6, 2014.

Without Johannes' unremitting support back then, I most probably would still be stuck messing with some scripted languages, and I would most probably never have tried to write GUI programs at all. This really changed a lot for me, and for what I do in my free time ;-) I would possibly never have started "real" programming. So I want to say this again: Thanks a lot and kudos to Johannes Zarl-Zierl!

May the next 10 years be as nice and as productive as the last ones.