Good evening fellas,

Happy New Year to all! The year 2017 has been a rollercoaster, to be honest. Well, it was rich and prosperous year regarding in technical terms. It was a beautiful year of great learning, splendid travel and got to network with some fantastic folks all around the globe.

The best reason for making this 2017 incredible for me is KDE. One of the exciting community I have ever seen! It all started at the end of 2016, I got intrigued by the Tagline of KDE, “Experience freedom”. I started contributing to various projects inside KDE. My initial start was with Konsole, system settings, KIO and various educational suite programs. Moving on, I came across a student program organized by KDE named KDE-SoK and I was selected for it, yay!!!

The project was with KStars(KDE’s amateur astronomy software which provides real-time and an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth.) to collect a new set of images from NASA/ESO catalogs along with orientation and pixel scale (arcsecs/pixel) from the whole set of Messier Catalog (which is a collection of 110 astronomy objects in the night sky). Images were processed for overlay in KStars using OpenCV, so to have transparency and to modulate according to the software.

After the successful completion of the project, I was invited as a speaker to give a talk on “Object-Tracking Using OpenCV and Qt” at KDE India Conference held at IIT Guwahati in March 2017. Again, yay!! :P. There I met a lot of enthusiastic KDE people out there. :)

Later on, I was selected as a Google Summer of Code (2017 edition) intern funded by Google. I contributed to Krita(Krita is a professional and open source painting program) of KDE. The project was to Integrate share.krita.org.

Share.krita.org is a place where users can share Krita scripts, images, brush packs and more. This project has two parts: integrate with the KNSCore part of the KNewStuff framework (or reimplement the protocol) and create a GUI for sharing. The second part is improving the support for creating and editing bundles. Bundles can contain brushes, patterns, gradients and so on. Also, Krita needed basic support for creating and editing bundles.

Thus said, the entire journey with KDE last year was splendid!! The community as such is a group of awesome and enthusiastic people from all around the globe. To do more than I could last year – I hope to be a part of this great venture in 2018.

Here’s to a productive year, and looking forward to the same in 2018. You can see more of what happened in KDE in 2017 on the KDE year-end fundraiser page. Please do show some of your support to the community and its developers through the fundraiser to built your favorite software :)

Some of my blog post regarding my work last year:

To the awesome year coming right your way,

Cheers.