After gaining some experience being a GSoC (backup) mentor last year I am mentoring a GSoC student again this year. As it worked out to have a co-mentor, I could convince Ralf to join me in this role to support Suraj Kumar Mahto in his project to replace the current KMyMoney online quote support with the general online quote functionality found in the Alkimia library. The Alkimia version provides a lot more functionality for the end user and is already found in the KMyMoney version based on KDE4. Suraj already brings some experience of working in and with the KDE community and contributed to multiple projects in the last year.
Vice versa, I am co-mentoring Ralf’s student on his quest to add pretty printers for debugging support of Qt/KDE applications. Ebuka is currently using the Community Bonding phase to get acquainted with the KDE community, its procedures, infrastructure and alike.
As an initial step to, Ralf and I setup a video conference with each of them this weekend. I am thankful to my employer that we can use the company’s infrastructure for it also in the future. We had an hour with each of them to get to know each other, see some faces behind the names, e-mail addresses and irc/matrix/telegram nicks. We exchanged some details about our and their educational, professional and private lives. Regarding the projects, we walked through the proposed timelines and also dove a bit into code issues and questions the students had. This should provide a good base for the weeks ahead.
I think, we laid the ground for both projects to succeed and now count on the students to get started and productive. After all, it’s usually 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration. Ralf and I wish them luck and promised to provide help wherever possible.