By Allyson Alexandrou

Nuritzi Sanchez is the Senior Open Source Project Manager at GitLab Inc. Previously, Nuritzi has worked at Endless and was the President and Chairperson at GNOME. KDE is excited to have Nuritzi as a keynote speaker at this year's Akademy to talk about Collaborative Communication in the Open Source community.

Lydia Pintscher is KDE e.V.'s current Vice President and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.'s Product Manager for Wikidata. Lydia is a free software and free culture enthusiast who was the President of the e.V. in years past. As the current Vice President of KDE e.V. you will see her talking about updates on KDE's goals during Akademy.

Today we are lucky to have both of these well accomplished women sit down to take a moment to talk about their lives, accomplishments, visions for the future, and how we can continue to uplift young women in the technology and open source sector.

Lydia: Hey :)

Allyson: Hi there!

Nuritzi: HI everyone!

Allyson: Thank you for being here. Shall we get started?

Nuritzi: Sure, happy to be here :) And nice to see you all

Lydia: Let's do this!

Allyson: First Question: Every superhero has a defining moment in their origin story: Bruce Wayne fell into a cave full of bats when he was a young boy, Jessica Jones was exposed to radioactive material in a traffic accident... What was your defining moment? What happened that put you on course to where you are today? Were you a child? In high school? At college?

Lydia: Haha. There were a few defining moments I'd say but one that definitely changed the course of my career was when a friend and fellow student in college told me to come and join the booth for one of KDE's projects at a big Linux expo in Berlin. I was contributing to the project for a while here and there already but didn't really feel like I'm a part of it.

Anyway - he wouldn't accept a no and excuses like "I wouldn't know what to tell people who ask questions about the program." I went there and didn't know what I was doing for the first day but then it was smooth sailing and I met the best people who welcomed me with open arms. Been with KDE ever since and have no regrets!

Allyson: That is amazing Lydia! Sounds like a very significant moment that pushed you into the world of KDE quite quickly. And Nuritzi, what about you?

Nuritzi: For me, I think there are several defining moments -- I can't narrow down to just one. The first is when I was really young and would visit Mexico with my parents since they're from there and a lot of my family is still there. I developed a desire to do something to help level the playing field for more people around the world, not just in the US, and I was able to see a kind of poverty that I didn't see in Silicon Valley (to be clear, it was a different kind. Poverty in the Silicon Valley still exists). Throughout my career, I've explored ways of doing that and since I am from the Silicon Valley, I think tech seemed a pretty obvious choice for how I could try to influence worldwide change.

Another moment for me was when I was in the 8th grade and a teacher encouraged me to go to a leadership summit. It taught me to have a leadership mindset, and that being a leader was really possible.

Lastly, for open source, I came across it because of the work I was doing at Endless. We created computers for users without internet and did a lot of research in Latin America, and I started to learn about the Linux app ecosystem and the world of GNOME. For me, contributing to open source became a way to work towards the social change goals I developed really early on.

I agree with you Lydia -- that warm reception of people welcoming me with open arms into GNOME was a defining reason of why I joined. The social aspect of contributing to projects is equally important as the technical aspect, in my opinion.

Allyson: Nuritzi, That sounds incredible as well.

And I can most definitely relate to you both with the warm welcome received in the open source communities.

We touched on this a bit already, but I would like to follow up just a bit more. You both have been extremely successful in the technology industry (namely open source of course), while Lydia studied computer programming at uni, Nuritzi you were in international relations.

Nuritzi, How do you think this has affected your mindset and work you have done in your career so far?

And Lydia, what sorts of influences did you have to choose to study computer programming rather than something else?

Lydia: Working with technology and computers in particular has always been interesting and a lot of fun for me. I think that's something I have from my mom. (Thanks, mom!) Being able to make a piece of code or text do what you want is incredibly empowering, starting with something simple like messing with the html of a website many many years ago.

I am dismayed at the world moving more and more into a world where technology is something that's given to you and you take it as it is as opposed to something you tinker with. This feeling of being able to change the world around you is something many many more people should have but sadly don't. That's why I'm spending so much of my professional and volunteer time on opening up software and data so that more people can tinker. If my life had turned out differently I'd probably become a vet (thanks, dad!) or a lawyer. Not sure how I feel about that today ;-)

Nuritzi: I actually studied International Relations and Psychology in undergrad, and I'm really glad to be bringing that perspective into FOSS! Because of my academic background, and my personal interests, I have a natural leaning towards thinking about the experience of products, communities, etc. through a cultural and people-focused lens.

Open source is just as much about social challenges as it is about technical challenges, and so I've found many ways to jump right in and help, even though I'm not a programmer. In fact, there's so much to do in those areas, that I've become passionate about getting more people into open source that are from diverse backgrounds.

Even beyond what's become more obvious (e.g. user experience design, translations, engagement, and documentation). For example, people who are interested in Sales or Business Development might be great fundraisers, and fundraising is something that communities really need! I'm kind of mad that I didn't know about open source sooner. At Stanford University, where I studied, I didn't hear once about open source -- and I think it's a shame. There's a lot of opportunity to get awesome students involved in open source from psych, international relations, economics, medical fields -- everyone!

Allyson: Thats pretty interesting! I very much admire the want/drive/need to give to others that you both have touched on already.

That's a very fair point you made Nuritzi. American universities in general do not tend to use open source software. And it is a pity because there are many students at American universities who could really use the experience and exposure that would come with an internship. Or even just working on open source projects as many students do in the KDE community

Nuritzi: Agreed!

Lydia: Yeah all around the world really. Contributing to an open source project for a while gives you so much experience and helps you grow, especially as people in KDE and other projects are willing to take you along and support you along the way.

Allyson: I absolutely think that the welcoming vibes that are common in open source communities could benefit students and younger professionals so much!

Nuritzi: Yes, and an important aspect of getting students in is building relationships and supporting their teachers. Because a lot of teachers are the ones who encourage students to try new things, or help guide them in person.

When speaking at an all woman's college in Oakland, California, a couple of years ago, the feedback I received from the teachers is that they felt disconnected from the open source communities and would be eager to be more plugged in and get their students involved

I think we often focus on the students only and skip teachers, so would love to see more of that relationship-building in the future

Allyson: ^^ Absolutely! Teachers can make such an impact on the lives of their students. It is a special bond that is created with amazing teachers or mentors and their students

To keep on moving, are there any particular projects (volunteering or business opportunity) that you both are most proud of? And are there any current projects you are working on that you are particularly excited about?

Lydia: I think for me that would be KDE's vision and Goals and having brought that to fruition. KDE was becoming so large, diverse and splintered that it was very hard for us as a community to understand what we're really all about and what drives us.

Redefining KDE's vision and the resulting Goals processes helped us grow together again and rally behind a shared vision for the future that we are all working towards: A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. It always makes me happy to see what impact this had on the KDE community over the past few years and what amazing new people joined us because of it.

Nuritzi: I think I'm relatively new to open source compared to many members in the GNOME and KDE communities. I started actively contributing to GNOME back in 2015, and less than a year later I was encouraged to run for the Board of Directors and was voted in as President and Chairperson, so I'm pretty proud of that.

The things that I mentioned before in my approach to open source community building and leadership is really what I wanted to share with the GNOME community and I'm very thankful for how receptive they were to that perspective and how encouraging they were to let me contribute in that way. During my time at the GNOME Foundation we hired an Executive Director after several years of not having one, attracted donations of over $1 million, and saw many people join us or re-join us. We also started a more active collaboration with KDE, which I'm particularly proud of.

I think there's a lot that we can collaborate on and I'm of the bridge-making mindset! We launched the Linux App Summit along with KDE because of our closer collaboration. And I want to add that I was able to do that only because of the mentors I had within the community, the kind encouragement of some individuals, and the positive environment GNOME has.

Lydia: True! I think it has served both projects well.

Allyson: Wow!

Do either of you see any new collaborations coming up? More specifically, any sort of collaboration to help get more young women into open source?

Lydia: Nothing particularly exciting right now unfortunately.

Allyson: Do you think this could be a possibility in the near future?

Nuritzi: To answer your other question, I'm still involved in organizing the Linux App Summit this year, although I'm more in a support role this time around. Aleix is doing a great job at leading it this year!

I'm also involved in CHAOSS, which is a community centered around metrics and measuring the health of open source communities. There was a lot of structural change within the GNOME Foundation that we created due to all the awesome stuff happening, and I really think that the next stage of our community's maturity is to measure how we are doing and iterate in order to improve.

My goal when joining the GNOME Foundation was to help get it into a more strategic mindset and not just surviving but growing and thriving. Data is crucial for that. So I'm really excited to be working on that initiative (along with some KDE people, I might add)!

Lydia: Absolutely. I'd love to, for example, make it possible for KDE to take part in initiatives like Outreachy again to give women a good path to contributing to KDE and open source at large.

Nuritzi: I think there's room for collaboration on those metrics, and it's something that's already underway. I also think that we're collaborating more in the Linux app space, which is crucial for both of our orgs. I would love to see that expanded.

Also, I think that there's room for collaborating on things like onboarding initiatives and making more inclusive environments. While each org may have their own spin on it, I think sharing in those efforts would be beneficial since our orgs are likely to need to learn about similar things / might have similar ideas

Lydia: Yeah that's definitely something we should closely collaborate on.

Allyson: Very cool! This is beginning to sound like an interesting upcoming opportunity for open source communities.

Nuritzi: Honestly, I think there's a lot of room for collaborating more on a TON of the social challenges our open source orgs face -- and with orgs beyond that!

I'm also part of another group called FOSS Responders that formed to help orgs that are experiencing financial difficulty because of COVID and I was able to meet people from Drupal, Python, GitHub, Indeed, Spotify, etc...

I think it's important for us to join other communities and create bridges because SO MUCH of what they were also involved with seemed super relevant to GNOME and KDE! Yep! I agree :)

Unfortunately, I haven't been as involved in GNOME since I started a new job at GitLab and am trying to ramp up / make lots of awesome improvements for the open source world there. But this kind of stuff is where my heart lies, and I'm happy to be part of initiatives where we collaborate on newcomer experiences and the like! :)

Lydia: I think that's a common challenge - so many important and worthwhile things to do and only so much time to do them.

Nuritzi: But yeah, Lydia -- I'd love to connect about all of this afterward and start connecting some more dots :)

Lydia: That's one of the things that's hard but you need to learn in open source: prioritize and spend your time on the things that matter the most

Allyson: Absolutely! This is all very encouraging to hear.

Nuritzi: Yeppp definitely. I actually experienced a bit of burnout and so right now I'm in the process of achieving a more balanced approach at contributing. And yes, I 100% agree with that, Lydia

Allyson: Are there any other tips you both would pass along to young women (or younger people in general) about getting started in open source? Was there anything you learned that could be useful to those still gaining experience?

Lydia, prioritizing and task/time management are so crucial. It is good to see you point that out

Lydia: There are so many things, some of them we put together in Open Advice.

Looking back today I would say the best opportunities opened up for me when I stopped saying no to projects/opportunities a mentor offered me simply because I felt I wasn't up to the task. They offered it for a reason after all and they were right that I was capable of it. The world is holding you back enough. You don't need to help it in addition.

Nuritzi: A lot of people are talking about this in the open source world, but mentorship is really key. So finding those people that you can go to when you have questions, or can help guide you is really important. In order to do that, it's important to take advantage of social events that the community has and ways that the community has set up to create 1:1 relationships.

In this COVID era, having a video call can go a long way. Don't hesitate to reach out to people and see if they'd be willing to chat and share their experience with you. I also suggest trying to develop the leadership mindset. If you're willing to take on responsibility, then responsibility usually comes your way in an open source community. You need to show that your reliable and there for the medium-term though in order to really get plugged in and making a difference. I'd say the usual time is 6+ months, and then to consider staying really active for at least 2-3 years. It's hard because it's volunteer-only, so make sure that you pay attention to your mental health and that you prioritize your well-being before anything else!

Being part of a community like GNOME and KDE is so rewarding though -- professionally and personally! For me, the volunteer time was definitely worth it and the experience has enriched my life is so many ways!

Oooo, Lydia, I didn't know about Open Advice! I'll definitely be checking that out and sharing :)

Lydia: :)

Nuritzi: It's nice to see some familiar faces there!

Lydia: And I completely agree. If you have a mentor or sponsor who supports you that's worth so much. That also means that it is important for people like us to lift up the next generation. If you're in a position where you can be a sponsor for a person: do it! It'll make such a difference for them.

Nuritzi: Yes. 10000000000% agree to that!

Allyson: Great points!

Alright my last BIG question for you both is... drum roll please ...

Lydia: :D

Allyson: Do you both have any upcoming works that we should keep an eye out for? For example, any podcasts or books?

Lydia: I'm spending a ton of my time working on Wikidata, a knowledge base and sister project of Wikipedia. It's an incredible source of general purpose data and I'd love to see many more open source projects make use of it. One in KDE that already does it is KItinerary for airport data.

Nuritzi: I don't have anything fancy planned, but I'm really excited about a speech I've started to give about collaborative communication. It's a topic that I think is super relevant not only in open source communities, but in life. I've had feedback from people who said it's been really useful as we go over things like cultural differences (and potential conflict that could arise because of it), active listening, giving AND receiving feedback, and some other of my favorite communication hacks. I have a version of it on YouTube somewhere (just search for my name "Nuritzi Sanchez" and "Communication Hacks"), and I'll be giving the speech live (and in some cases an expanded version), at some upcoming events. I encourage you to check it out!

Allyson: Nuritzi we can't wait to hear about this at Akademy as well!

Nuritzi: :) :) :)

Allyson: Lydia, KItinerary sounds quite interesting. I will have to go look it up.

Thank you both so much for taking time out of your busy schedules to have this chat!

Lydia: Thanks for having us!

Nuritzi: Thanks for organizing this -- it was fun!

Allyson: I can't wait to *virtually* see you both next month!

Nuritzi: Same here! Looking forward to it

Allyson: In the mean time, stay safe and healthy. Lydia have a wonderful evening & Nuritzi enjoy the rest of your day!

Nuritzi: Thank you! Bye, all! :)

Lydia: Thank you! Bye! :)

Nuritzi will be delivering the keynote speech "Open Source Resilience and Growth: Creating Communities that Thrive" on September 6 at Akademy 2020.

Register now and don't miss it!

Gina Häußge's biggest claim to fame may be OctoPrint, the most popular software for managing 3D printers from small, single board computers -- like the Raspberry Pi, Odroid, etc..

OctoPrint is currently Gina's main occupation, but it wasn't always like that. In this Interview she talks about how a tech-loving child nearly got eaten up by the software industry, but thankfully managed to escape and transform her FLOSS passion project into her day job (plus a whole bunch of other nerdy stuff).

Enjoy.

Gina Häußge: Hello there!

Paul Brown: Hello Gina! You are early!

Gina: Well, this gives me a nicer start to the day than having to field endless support requests along the lines of "it's broken, pls fix kthxbai".

Paul: A good place to start, because I understand you just released a new version of OctoPrint. How did that go?

Gina: It's still a bit tricky to say at the moment. I pushed 1.4.1 on Tuesday and rollout looked good, apart from the usual issues experienced by people due to hiccups in their environment. Then I got three bug reports, one somewhat critical and thus on Thursday, I released hotfix 1.4.2. And since then I've been monitoring the rollout of that.

So far it looks like a good update, and that makes me happy obviously. Was quite the weird time developing this the past few months with Corona dominating all our lives one way or the other.

Paul: Two topics in there we will catch up with later, but first let's get into how you got here. Because most superheroes have an origin story: Batman fell into a cave full of bats, Carol Danvers had an accident with an alien device and became Captain Marvel... What is yours? What happened that put you on the road to become the (let's not mince words here) massive nerd you currently are?

Gina: I guess I've just always been that way. I grew up in the 80s in Germany, and I can't remember a time when I was NOT drawn to technical stuff, wanting to know how things tick, wanting to build.

My parents thankfully encouraged that and provided a steady supply of fun stuff to learn and try and build with, like electronics kits, chemistry kits, a microscope, tons of Lego and so on. Not given for a girl in the 80s, so I'm really grateful to them.

At some point when I was maybe six or seven, we got an old computer from my uncle. I wanted to play on this thing obviously, but my dad took me aside and told me "this is a tool to work with, not a toy. I can show you something cool to do with it though". And then he introduced me to BASIC and programming. I was pretty much instantly hooked.

Paul: Ah! The Defining MomentTM!

Gina: It was a bit like playing/getting creative with Lego, but without the bricks running out and the ability to create your own bricks if need be ^^.

And yeah, definitely a defining moment. I continued exploring the world of programming while growing up, went from BASIC to Pascal and then C and C++, and quite early figured out what I wanted to do in life (once I learned that "Software Engineer" existed as a job).

After graduating from school, I went to university to study Computer Science, got my degree there, then after a brief stop in academics, I switched into the industry and started my life as a professional Software Engineer. Apparently, I was fairly good at that, meaning I got promoted... further and further away from the code that I loved shaping so much.

Paul: That seems to be a trend: good developers get promoted up into management.

Gina: It's a horrible trend. I really wish there were more career options for good developers. I think of myself as a good dev, but I really abhor management duties. Can do that in a pinch, but I don't enjoy it. So yeah... that was not so fun.

So back in November 2012, I bought myself a 3D printer after having circled around the idea of getting one ever since seeing them in action at Hacking At Random 2009 (Dutch hacker festival). Built it, set it up, had a ton of fun in doing so.

Paul: Were you still in the industry back then?

Gina: Yeah... I was still living a life as a "Technical Architect" at a somewhat larger IT consulting and custom solution development company. Team manager and architect by day, nerd by night.

Paul: So... 3D printer = "Defining Moment - Part II"?

Gina: I guess so :D. Christmas came around and with it, a 2 week vacation. I figured I might as well scratch the by that point somewhat urgent itch of getting my hands on some code again and wrote a web interface for my 3D printer, mostly from scratch.

I had no idea how printers worked, but I just decided to figure that out along the way and use a communication layer from another project in the meantime. And thus, what is today known as OctoPrint was born.

I publicly posted about what I was working on December 25th 2012 as far as I remember. Just a small post in the Google+ 3D printing community. Threw my work up on Github a couple days later after it did everything I wanted it to do for now. I figured "Ok, that's done now" and went back to work a couple days after New Year's.

And then the messages started. People from all over the world were suddenly getting in touch with me about how what I had built was what they'd been looking for so long now, and that it was almost exactly what they needed, but could I maybe add this little thing or make it work with that particular printer?

I suddenly had a full grown Open Source project on my hands. I did it next to my (quite stressful I might add) day job. Even talked to my boss and got him to reduce my contract to 4 days a week (at reduced pay of course) to be able to dedicate one day per week to what was now called OctoPrint.

But the project grew and grew and ate more and more of my time. No evenings, no weekends, no vacation without taking care of OctoPrint. Sometime in early 2014, I realized that this was not sustainable that way. I was constantly tired, my day job was more and more unfulfilling, what was supposed to be just a pet project more and more demanding, but also actually helping people out there contrary to what I got paid for (or at least it felt that way).

So, when I got an offer by a technology company that also was dipping its toes into 3D printing to get employed by them to work full time on OctoPrint while keeping full control and ownership of it, I took that opportunity.

Paul: Oh! That was lucky!

Gina: Indeed it was, and I'm still really happy that I could do that jump. I quit my old day job and started my life as a full time Open Source developer in August 2014.

Paul: Well, not lucky. Based on merits, obviously.

Gina: I guess it was a combination of luck and being able to display what I could do if given the chance. Full time meant a whole different pace and way bigger sub projects that I could now take on. So, I did. OctoPrint continued to grow and its community with it. It was sometimes a bit lonely working from home, but it also had its big advantages. No interruptions ^^.

Well, apart from the mailman dropping off packages for me or the neighbours.

Paul: Printer parts?

Gina: Printer parts, drones, electronic components ^^. And of course, a stream of test equipment. Printer electronics, Raspberry Pis and other SBCs, as that's the primary platform for OctoPrint to run on. So, every time a new version came out, I had to get one to test the builds against.

Life was all in all good.

But then, in April 2016, there was a big complication. The company that had hired me had to downsize some departments for financial reasons. That meant they also had to pull the plug on our arrangement.

Paul: Oh no! What happened?

Gina: Well, I found myself in the situation that I had this huge Open Source project on my hands that really was not a thing you could still do on the side, but I also had no funding. I could just have said, "well, okay then" and gotten myself a regular job again. No risk, steady paycheck. But not as exciting either.

So, I did what just two or so years prior I had laughed off and decided to go self-employed. I figured I would probably kick myself for the rest of my life if I didn't even TRY to see if I could maybe continue working on OctoPrint full time funded through crowdfunding. So, I went for that. Set up a Patreon campaign, pushed out a "Call to Action" on all social feeds of the project and hoped for the best.

Paul: I am on the edge of my seat.

Gina: To this day it still amazes me that this actually worked. People put their money where their mouth is and actually started supporting me. So did one or two companies. After two months I was back at a sustainable level of income.

Paul: What a roller-coaster. But it makes sense that 3D printer manufacturers would support your work.

Gina: And since then it has just... worked. The only reason why OctoPrint has seen constant maintenance, improvements and growth over the past four years is its awesome community that helps fund it.

Paul: Not to get to deep into monetary details here, but would you say that most income comes from community members then?

Gina: Oh, definitely. I also have some ad revenue and income from kit resales through partners. But the major chunk is and always has been community donations, which absolutely amazes me.

Paul: OctoPrint also has a healthy plugin ecosystem.

Gina: Yes, and I'm really happy about that!

Paul: Many of the plugins are provided by community members. How about the core? Do you get many contributions to that?

Gina: Sadly no. Most of the core development is still done by me alone. I might have partially caused that by introducing the plugin system back in 2015.

That was an intentional decision though, as that way people who want features can implement them but also maintain them. It's not a case of "here is a piece of code that does this and that against this piece of obscure hardware. Have fun keeping it working from now on. Cheers!".

Because THAT isn't really manageable and would have quickly made OctoPrint become a giant piece of hard-to-maintain and impossible-to-test code. I didn't want that, not only for my sake, but also for the sake of its users.

No one wants to install a giant piece of bloatware that does everything but cook coffee, when all you want is to stream files to a 3D printer. So, people can install core OctoPrint and then add and mix and match whatever plugins they want.

Paul: What about a team? Wouldn't you like to have, I don't know, two or three stable colleagues to work with?

Gina: Oh, definitely! But the funding for that isn't there. I have some people who are more or less regular contributors, help me with ticket triage and support and such. But sadly, I've not been able to attract a core team of maintainers.

I sometimes think that might also be due to the audience of OctoPrint. In the beginning, it was mostly used by developers who also happened to have a 3D printer. 3D printers were still expensive and niche, and you needed to know your tech and be prepared to tinker with things to get them to work properly.

These days 3D printers are sold in hardware stores for less than 500 bucks and the people who use them range from miniature hobbyists to RC fans to HAM radio operators, retired engineers who want to print stuff for their model trains, school children...

I think there's not that big of an overlap between people who know how to write code and people who own a 3D printer as there used to be. That means it's a bit tricky to find people with the knowledge and enthusiasm to help beyond "I found this bug, here's a fix, bye".

Paul: But still, it is risky to have only one developer. For the project, I mean. The bus factor and all that...

Gina: I totally agree. It's one of the things I worry about. But I don't really know how to change it other than trying to recruit from the pool of plugin developers here and there ;). Maybe I should leave in more bugs so people feel motivated to help :P.

Paul: That would be just evil. Let's move on to happier topics: your recent release. In the latest, say, two or three releases, what do you think is the biggest change? What things will users most notice?

Gina: That would probably be the granular permission system introduced in 1.4.0. See, before that release, OctoPrint only knew two classes of users. Regular users and admins. In 1.4.0 that changed. There's now a broad range of permissions assigned to all the functionality built into OctoPrint, and users can create their own groups that e.g. allow printer control but no access to the time-lapse functionality, or - since a bug fix in 1.4.1 - create, read-only users that can look but not touch, stuff like that.

This was a feature requested again and again over the years but a behemoth to implement. Thankfully, I got a huge contribution for that from a long term on-and-off contributor and, after some intense refactoring and cursing here and there, we managed to get this implemented in tandem.

Paul: So you can have people watching the print progress, for example, but cannot mess it up by pressing the wrong button?

Gina: Yeah, exactly.

Paul: I must update.

Gina:The other big thing that people probably don't notice, but will notice as OctoPrint continues to simply work, is that from 1.4.0 OctoPrint is also compatible with Python 3. OctoPrint's backend is written in Python and, up until 1.4.0, it only supported Python 2. That version of Python, however, has been deemed end-of-life as of January 1st of 2020 and that meant that OctoPrint had to be ported to Python 3.

Sadly, the two are incompatible here and there, which made it a huge undertaking. But I thankfully also got some help.

Paul: What about the Next Big ThingTM? What does the future hold for OctoPrint users?

Gina: One big thing I'm currently laying the groundwork for by after-hours learning is a new user interface.

Paul: Oooh! That sounds nice!

Gina: Currently OctoPrint still runs a, by now, outdated version of Bootstrap, the UI isn't responsive, it's a bit messy on mobile devices and overall, it just looks aged.

The thing is, I can't just rip it out and build a new one, because there are a ton of third party plugins out there in the ecosystem that rely on it and that would no longer work if it was just removed suddenly.

Hence, I introduced the ability to add alternative user interfaces through plugins two years ago and I am currently catching up on current technologies for browser-based user interfaces to make a technological decision. I am currently working through online courses for both React and VueJS.

The idea will then be to create the new UI as a bundled plugin next to the existing one, offer extension hooks for the existing plugins so that they can hook into the new and old interfaces, and then, once there's some good amount of support, make the new one the primary, but keep the old in a bit longer.

Updates like this get tricky when you have to keep the health of a vibrant plugin ecosystem in mind :)

Paul: You probably realize that about half your userbase will complain when you make the change, right?

Gina: Obviously. But if I didn't push new features or improvements whenever someone complained I would have stopped working on OctoPrint back in 2013 :P.

Paul: Heh heh! Damn right

Gina: People always complain. They even complain when you tell them "Hey, your printer's firmware is known to have a flaw that could mean it can burn down your house, MAYBE you should look into that ASAP".

Paul: OctoPrint reminds me of this ALL THE TIME!

Gina: You should really fix your firmware then; it's not doing that for fun ;).

Paul: What other stuff are you into? You seem like the kind of person who would have plenty of other creative hobbies and interests.

Gina: Just too little time for them XD .

Paul: Have you picked up anything new during lockdown?

Gina: First of all I'm a passionate video gamer. I'm currently working my way slowly but steadily through Witcher 3, still have a bunch of XCOM expansions to work through, and there are also some nice new things coming out this year.

Last year I got into pen & paper RPGs and bouldering, but sadly both got somehow nuked by lockdown due to social distancing mandates.

Paul: Bouldering?

Gina: Yeah, rock-climbing. No rope, 5 - 6 m height tops, crash pad at the bottom. I have a bit of a fear of heights and sit too much, so when a friend from university asked if I wanted to join him in trying that out, I was "heck yeah" - a chance to combat a fear, get in shape AND solve problems? Count me in

Paul: Ah!

Gina: I also tinker with electronics, just built myself my first custom mechanical macropad in fact.

Paul: What is that?

Gina: Think a stand-alone numpad for your keyboard, with mechanical switches and programmable.

Paul: Any other coding projects?

Gina: Currently not. But I recently did a bit of an extracurricular task related to OctoPrint and built myself a test-rig to help with automating my pre-release tests. That involved playing with a laser cutter, coding up some automation tasks in a tool for that and some enclosure design and such and was a TON of fun, plus it now saves me literally hours per release.

I have two Pis sitting here just for update tests and on each update, I will flash them to various versions of the OctoPi image (a Raspberry Pi distribution for OctoPrint), the provision that, get it up to a base version and then test whether the update from that version to the new release or release candidate works as it should and if everything looks alright after. Having to flash the SD cards for that manually, doing provisioning and all that for a whole test matrix on each release was horribly time consuming. So, I automated that.

I wrote a post about that on the OctoBlog with some pictures.

I also somewhat recently built myself a hardware button for controlling my Sonos system (volume control, pause, forward, back), that involved soldering, mechanical design and some programming. I used an ESP8266 and MicroPython to interface with that and now can control stuff with it.

Then I pimped a scooter for getting around 36c3, with LED effects and speedometer and so on.

I also have home automation as a hobby, so there are sensors throughout my flat and I sometimes spend way too much time on automating stuff in NodeRED just to save me some time elsewhere. I no longer forget to open the dishwasher after it has run for example, because my home automation now detects when it's done through power consumption and sends me a push notification on my phone. I do small projects like that here and there for fun.

Oh... and sometimes I bake bread ^^.

Paul: Bake bread... Is this a lockdown thing?

Gina: In my case it started in early 2019 and I was a bit annoyed when I couldn't find any yeast and flour anymore due to everyone ELSE starting with that too during the lockdown. But in fact, I wasn't able to pick anything new up during lockdown, as I was too busy not drowning in support requests.

Paul: Oh! Are people printing more during lockdown?

Gina: The thing with lockdown was everyone apparently had a ton of more time all of a sudden to use their 3D printers. And with a huge demand for PPE (personal protection equipment) and not enough availability, a lot of people jumped in and helped printing face shields and such.

So that meant a HUGE increase in prints, more people running into problems that needed help and such. The number of OctoPrint instances I see via the anonymous usage tracking spiked. So did the hours of prints per day. I spent April and May under a ton of stress due to that. Was drowning in mails, tickets, forum posts and so on. It was a bit insane.

It got to a point where I was actually somewhat seeing red whenever I saw some post scroll past me on Twitter along the lines of "now that you have so much free time on your hands, why not learn something new" XD.

Paul: Again it sounds like you need a team! Apart from becoming a stable developer, how else can people help?

Gina: Helping out others on the forums is always good! So is helping the Release Candidates! The current release has once again shipped with some bugs that could have been detected if people with less mainstream kind of setups or workflows would have participated in the month long RC phase.

What we need there is diversity: the more variant in environments the better. I cannot test against every possible hardware and workflow combination under the sun, but if we get a couple hundred RC testers together for each release, and they also take the time to properly report issues, with logs and such, that can ensure that stuff works fine

Paul: Also donations? What is your Patreon page?

Gina: I no longer have just a Patreon page, there's a multitude of ways now to support my work financially: Patreon, PayPal, Github Sponsors to name a few.

Paul: So fascinating. We could go on for hours, but I think I should let you get back to your hobbies. And OctoPrint, of course!

Gina: It's a work day, so it's OctoPrint only for the next couple of hours ^^.

Paul: Thank you so much for your time.

Gina: Thank you for the opportunity to share my journey :)

Paul: We are all looking forward to your talk at Akademy! See you there!

Gina: See you :)

Gina will be delivering the keynote speech "Adventures in Open Source Development" on September 5 at Akademy 2020.

Register now and don't miss it!

The updates to KDE apps released today are many, contain a wide array of changes, and cover an impressive number of applications.

Dolphin, KDE's file explorer, for example, adds previews for more types of files and improvements to the way long names are summarized, allowing you to better see what each file is or does. Dolphin also improves the way you can reach files and directories on remote machines, making working from home a much smoother experience. It also remembers the location you were viewing the last time you closed it, making it easier to pick up from where you left off.

For those of you into photography, KDE's professional photo management application, digiKam has just released its version 7.0.0. The highlight here is the smart face recognition feature that uses deep-learning to match faces to names and even recognizes pets.

If it is the night sky you like photographing, you must try the new version of KStars. Apart from letting you explore the Universe and identify stars from your desktop and mobile phone, new features include more ways to calibrate your telescope and get the perfect shot of heavenly bodies.

And there's much more: KDE's terminal emulators Konsole and Yakuake; Elisa, the music player that looks great both on your desktop and phone; the text editor Kate; KDE's image viewer Gwenview; and literally dozens of other applications are all getting updated with new features, bugfixes and improved interfaces to help you become more productive and making the time you spend with KDE software more pleasurable and fun.

Check out the full announcement for all the goodies that lay in store for you.

Once again, KDE and GNOME are teaming up to bring you THE conference for people interested in establishing Linux as a great end-user platform. At the Linux App Summit we work on making app creation for users easy and worthwhile.

Since travel is complicated nowadays, we decided to make LAS 2020 a virtual conference. The event will open Thursday, 12th November and we'll wrap up on Saturday, 14th November. Our goal is to engage people in multiple time zones and make the content available online after the conclusion.

The Call for Talks is now open! Please take a look at the suggested topics and send in your ideas. We encourage new speakers, so don’t hesitate to submit a proposal!

Save the date on your calendar and we look forward to seeing you at LAS 2020!

Learn more about LAS 2020.

Important Dates:

• Call for Papers opens: Today!
• Call for Papers closes: September 15th
• Speakers announced: October 1st
• Conference: November 12th to November 14th

Today Slimbook and KDE launch the new KDE Slimbook.

The third generation of this popular ultrabook comes in a stylish sleek magnesium alloy case that is less than 20 mms thick, but packs under the hood a powerful AMD Ryzen 7 4800 H processor with 8 cores and 16 threads. On top of that runs KDE's Plasma desktop, complete with a wide range of preinstalled, ready-to-use Open Source utilities and apps.

Both things combined make the KDE Slimbook a one-of-a-kind machine ready for casual, everyday use, gaming and entertainment; design work, animation, and 3D rendering; as well as hardcore software development.

The KDE Slimbook can fit up to 64 GBs of DDR4 RAM in its two memory sockets, and has three USB ports, a USB-C port, an HDMI socket, a RJ45 for wired network connections, as well as support for the new Wifi 6 standard.

It comes in two sizes: the 14-inch screen version weighs 1.07 kg, and the 15.6-inch version weighs 1.49 kg. The screens themselves are Full HD IPS LED and cover 100% the sRGB range, making colors more accurate and life-like, something that designers and photographers will appreciate.

Despite its slim shell, the AMD processor and Plasma software deliver enough power to allow you to deploy a full home office with all the productivity and communications software you need. You can also comfortably browse the web and manage social media, play games, watch videos and listen to music. If you are the creative type, the Ryzen 4800 H CPU is well-equipped to let you express your artistic self, be it with painting apps like Krita, 3D design programs like Blender and FreeCAD, or video-editing software like Kdenlive.

If you are into software development, you are in luck too: KDE provides all the tools you need to code and supports your favorite languages and environments. Meanwhile, Slimbook's hardware is ideal for CPU-intensive tasks and will substantially shorten your build times.

Pricing for the KDE Slimbook starts at approximately € 899 for the 14'' version and at € 929 for the 15.6'', making it more affordable than most similarly-powered laptops. Besides, when you order a KDE Slimbook, you will also be contributing to KDE, as the Slimbook company actively supports and sponsors KDE and donates part of the proceedings back into the Community.

Find out more from the KDE Slimbook page.

After our final decision to adopt GitLab in November 2019, KDE started the work of tackling the many challenges that come with moving a whole development platform for a large open source community. KDE has now officially completed Phase One of the adoption and contributors have begun to use GitLab on a daily basis.

Why did we migrate to GitLab?

By switching to GitLab we will be offering our community one of the most popular and latest, fully-featured, actively developed, and supported DevOps platforms in existence today. This will contribute to boosting collaboration and productivity, and making our workflow more transparent and accessible to everyone who wants to contribute.

How will it benefit the wider community?

By using a platform offering an interface that most open source developers are nowadays familiar with, we will be lowering the bar for new contributors to join us, and providing a way for our community to continue to grow even faster in the coming years.

GitLab will also help us to achieve goals like "Consistency", as it will help our community members have a single solution to their needs. Now, we will be able to host and review code, manage projects/issues, communicate, collaborate, and develop software/applications on a single platform.

By adopting GitLab as a platform, we will be adding stability to our framework, as we will count on the support of GitLab as a company. GitLab, Inc. has nearly a decade of experience behind it, releases new versions on a regular basis and, apart from its in-house team, counts on an active community of third party contributors. This guarantees that our new development platform will be updated and maintained throughout the years.

KDE has migrated to GitLab and our instance is now live. Start discovering projects, groups and code on by visiting invent.kde.org.

You can read more about this migration on GitLab's blog.

Plasma 5.19 is out! If we gave alliterative names to Plasma releases, this one could be "Polished Plasma". The effort developers have put into squashing bugs and removing annoying papercuts has been immense.

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

Read the full announcement to discover all the new features and improvements of Plasma 5.19

Thursday, 14 May 2020.

It's time to test the beta release for Plasma 5.19!

In this release, we have prioritized making Plasma more consistent, correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements; worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability, making Plasma and its components easier to use and an overall more pleasurable experience.

Read on to discover all the new features and improvements of Plasma 5.19…

Plasma Desktop and Widgets

• We have improved the panel spacer so that it can automatically center widgets
• The System Monitor widgets have been rewritten from scratch
• Plasma now has a consistent design and header area in system tray applets as well as notifications
• We have refreshed the look of the media playback applet in the System Tray and of Task Manager tooltips
• There are completely new photographic avatars to choose from
• You can now see the name of the creator of a desktop wallpaper when you go to pick one
• Sticky notes get usability improvements
• You now have more control over the visibility of volume OSDs during certain situations
• GTK 3 applications immediately apply a newly selected color scheme and GTK 2 applications no longer have broken colors
• We have increased the default fixed-width font size from 9 to 10
• More consistent appearance with less ugly UI for switching the current audio device

System Settings

• Default Applications, Online Accounts, Global Shortcuts, KWin Rules and Background Services settings pages have all been overhauled
• When launching System Settings modules from within KRunner or the application launcher, the complete System Settings application launches on the page you asked for
• The Display settings page now shows the aspect ratio for each available screen resolution
• You now have more granular control over Plasma's animation speed
• We have added configurable file indexing for individual directories and you can now disable indexing for hidden files
• There is now an option that lets you configure the mouse and touchpad scroll speed under Wayland
• We have made lots of small improvements to the font configuration

Info Center

• The Info Center application has been redesigned with a look and feel that is consistent with the System Settings
• It is now possible to see information about your graphics hardware

KWin Window Manager

• The new subsurface clipping for Wayland greatly reduces the flickering in many applications
• Icons in titlebars are now recolored to fit the color scheme instead of sometimes being hard to see
• And in Wayland screen rotation now works for tablets and convertable laptops

Discover

• Flatpak repositories in use are easier to remove now
• Discover displays the application version for reviews
• Discover improved its visual and usability consistency

KSysGuard

• Our system monitor KSysGuard has gained support for systems with more than 12 CPU cores

Full Plasma 5.19 Beta changelog

by Akhil K Gangadharan and Valorie Zimmerman

The KDE Community welcomes our students for Google Summer Of Code 2020!

We are so grateful to the GSoC program for offering this opportunity to the KDE Community and our students. By the end of the summer, we hope that each of these students will be a confident KDE Developer, happy with their summer of work, and looking forward to supporting their code and newfound friends far into the future.

Krita is KDE’s professional free and open source painting program. The Krita team will mentor four students this year: L. E. Segovia will work on adding dynamic fill layers, Saurabh Kumar will implement a storyboard feature, Sharaf Zaman will bring SVG Mesh Gradients to Krita and Ashwin Dhakaita will integrate the MyPaint brush engine.

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite which includes a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10. This year GCompris will have two students with Deepak Kumar adding multiple datasets to several activities and Shubham Mishra will complete the multiple dataset task.

digiKam is KDE’s professional photo management software. This year digiKam will be mentoring two students: Nghia Duong will bring DNN based face recognition improvements to the app and R Kartik will make improvements to the face management workflow.

Cantor, which lets you use your favorite mathematical applications from within a nice KDE-integrated worksheet interface, will mentor Nikita Sirgienko. Nikita will extend the usability and feature set of Cantor and Shubham will be working on integrated documentation in Cantor.

Kirogi, a ground control application for drones, will have Kitae Kim improve MAVLink integration. Aniket Kumar will work with KDE Connect, which enables communication between all your devices, to improve MMS support to the SMS client. Paritosh Sharma will implement the Qt3D backend for Kstars, KDE’s astronomy software.

Anuj Bansal will work on replacing OpenLDAP based authentication with OAuth2 in KDE Websites. Jean Lima Andrade will add support to text annotation in marK, a machine learning dataset annotation tool. Prasun Kumar will work with KMyMoney, a personal finance manager, to integrate SQLite format support for bank data. Davide Briani will work to bring WikiToLearn 2.0 (collaborative textbooks) to life. For Qt, Agisilaos Kounelis will Port QtQuickControls Calendar component to QtQuickControls2 module.

Also, Sashmitha Raghav will work to bring basic subtitling support to Kdenlive, KDE’s video editor; ROCS, a Graph Theory IDE, will have Dilson Guimarães improving graph visualization capabilities; Shashwat Jolly will to bring EteSync sync backend to Akonadi, a database to store, index and retrieve personal information.

Detailed reports from our students will follow later this summer as the program progresses. We wish all of our students and mentors a safe, productive and a successful summer.

Akademy 2020 is getting closer and the KDE Community is warming up for its biggest yearly event. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE, this is your chance to present your work and ideas to the community at large.

Akademy 2020 will take place online from Friday the 4th to Friday the 11th of September 2020. Training sessions will be held on Friday the 4th of September and the talks will be held on Saturday the 5th and Sunday the 6th of September. The rest of the week (Monday - Friday) will be Birds-of-a-Feather meetings (BoFs), unconference sessions and workshops.

If you think you have something interesting to present, tell us about it. If you know of someone else who should present, encourage them to do so too.

Talk proposals on topics relevant to the KDE Community and technology are:

• Topics related to KDE's current Community Goals:
• Consistency
• All About the Apps
• Wayland
• KDE In Action: use cases of KDE technology in real life, be it on mobile, desktop deployments, embedded, and so on
• Overview of what is going on in the various areas of the KDE community
• Collaboration between KDE and other Free Software projects
• Release, packaging, and distribution of software by KDE
• Increasing our reach through efforts such as accessibility, promotion, translation and localization
• Improving our governance and processes, community building

Don't let this list restrict your ideas though! You can submit a proposal even if it doesn't fit in this list of topics as long as it is relevant to KDE. To get an idea of talks that were accepted previously, check out the program from previous years: 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Full details can be found in the Call for Proposals.

The deadline for submissions is Sunday 14th June 2020 23:59 UTC.