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The Power of Developer Meetings

Wednesday, 17 February 2010 | Dominik Haumann


Since several years, we have lots of small developer meetings in the KDE project, gratefully supported by the KDE e.V. There, developers of a certain project (e.g. KMail/kdepim, Plasma, you name it) meet to discuss further plans and to push the project further. From experience we can tell that those meetings are really beneficial in several ways:

  • Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor. This also happens at KDE’s annual conference Akademy, although there are a lot more people.
  • Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about how to do what are very focused. It’s amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I haven’t seen such focused work in companies, yet. I guess the variance in the knowledge of people involved is higher. And the motivation is usually very different).
  • Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very few free time to contributes to a project. Spreading the knowledge helps a lot to keep the project alive.
  • Steady Contributions: We are always open for new contributors. Just send a patch, get commit access and join development. Experience shows that participants of a developer meeting usually contribute for years to come.

Enough said, here is what happened the last three days in Kate:

There are even more changes I left out. Most of those changes will be in KDE 4.4.1. If you want to help, join #kate in irc.libera.chat!