Weak points that put me off in the past:
– api.kde.org is slow, difficult to search, lacks examples. Way beyond Qt’s docs at doc.trolltech.com.
– few junior jobs hidden in the depths of bugs.kde.org
– bugzilla is difficult and cumbersome to use (again, compare with Qt, which uses JIRA)

Strong points that kept me encouraged:
– IRC channels on the freenode always friendly and insightful.
– planetkde.org blogs that showed new and exciting developments.
– non-programming help from translators, SVG artists etc.

In my mind I say “I want to help with KDE”, but then where to start?

I would say that KDE (and indeed most open source projects) need to be much more accessible to the absolute beginner.

When I say absolute beginner, I don’t mean someone just learning how to write code — I am already an experienced coder — what I mean is someone who doesn’t know the APIs or the concepts used by the project, and doesn’t have the time to trawl through the documentation trying to find out.

In other words, a large and easy to follow section for examples. In multiple languages.

Case in point: There was a recent competition on the KDE site to write a Plasma applet. I thought to myself “I know Javascript; this could be a good chance for me to learn a bit about Plasma”. But when I tried browsing the links to the examples and documentation, I just got page load errors, so I gave up. I tried later after the competition was over, and the pages did load, but I found the examples insufficient, and I still couldn’t find the full API documentation.

It may be that I didn’t look in the right place or spend long enough looking for it, but to be honest, it was enough of a stumbling block for me that I just didn’t even get started. I may go back and have another look at some point, but it really needs to be easier to find and more of it.

Getting started in more complex software seems to be even harder. I have tried to find useful documentation for some of the smaller apps, but it all seems very haphazard. Maybe the core KDE projects are better organized? I don’t know; and at this rate I’ll never know, because I’m not going to dive into those without wetting my nose on the easier stuff.

Thanks for listening.

Re knowing where to start, does http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Junior_Jobs help at all? I suppose (but I’m no coder so I don’t know) it is tougher to understand and contribute to a codebase written by other people than to start your own. If our documentation is lacking then clearly that makes it harder. Documentation is, unfortunately, probably not really a fun thing so with a largely volunteer community perhaps it tends to suffer

@ regisg – great, I hope that works out. Did you already get on the mailinglist? (http://www.kdevelop.org/index.html?filename=mailinglist.html I think)

@ Adam – thanks, that is interesting (seems a pretty happy community – lots of people seem to not contribute because they think Python is doing fine already)

I would love to see KDE’s documents be more documented than it really is. Is there a way we can request a day or week to just documenting code? I know it would be really boring or just start urging applications and libraries to get documented.

So I “contribute” to the Open Source world by working on Qt applications.

http://jessenoller.com/2010/04/22/why-arent-you-contributing-to-python/