today's heroes

Every so often I'll post about my heroes for the day or week. These are people who have done something exceptional that elevates their efforts in quality, quantity, impact or all three. I'm sure we all see examples of this in KDE on a fairly regular basis, but it's nice to take a moment to let them know.

Such is the case with Dario Freddi Andres. (D. Freddi's a great guy, too, who is also active on b.k.o and Plasma .. but I was thinking about D. Andres. Too many Darios. Oops!) He's been an absolute monster on bugs.kde.org for the Plasma team for a while now. Dario comments on, tests, finds duplicates and even offers solutions on an amazing volume of reports. Without Dario, our bug list would be in much worse shape than it is.

The striking thing, at least for me, is Dario's knowledge of the entire body of reports. He often knows what reports are probably duplicates, when certain kinds of problems were fixed (so reports against older versions of Plasma / KDE / Qt can be flagged appropriately), etc. This is the kind of knowledge you can only get by being around the body of reports for an extended period of time. It's not unlike getting to know the layout of a town or the woods in your backyard: you need to do more than just glance at a map and walk through it once. To really get to know it, you have to spend time in it and move all around it.

I wish we had more Darios, as his level of knowledge about the reports in bugs.kde.org against Plasma is invaluable and certainly surpasses my own.

Another hero for the day is Skanlite. It's a small application that does exactly what I need it to: operate my scanner. It doesn't have a million fancy features. In fact, it has hardly any fancy features at all, and that's the beauty of it. I fire it up, it detects the scanner automatically without any configuration and lets me get to the business of scanning directly. I only use my scanner once every month or two, but when I do I don't want to spend time with it. I want to just throw some paper in it and hit a button, maybe adjust the contrast or DPI or switch to grayscale instead of colour. Skanlite does exactly that.

I'm sure there are those who need or want a more complicated and capable application for scanning because they do a lot of it on a daily basis and have additional needs like batch processing or image management. That's something that really belongs in a different application, however, and I applaud Skanlite for sticking to it's one purpose, which probably covers 99% of use cases right there, and doing a damn fine job of it.

Skanlite, of course, relies on things like USB and sane working properly in the operating system. These are things I couldn't take for granted not so many years ago with the exact same hardware (my flatbed scanner is rather old, but it's a great workhorse and keeps on churning), so kudos as well to the people working deeper in the stack: you make it possible to let people with good UI sensibilities attack those problems without getting lost in a maze of hardware issues.

My third hero for the day is Gitorious. I added a developer to the KDE developers team on Gitorious today, something I hadn't done before, and it took me all of ten seconds to figure it out and actually do it. This is what I call lowering the barriers to entry! So far my experience with the new Gitorious along with the Qt universe that is developing there is bringing nothing but smiles to my face. I'm looking forward to some of the more advanced features they have planned and hope that in the not-to-distant future we can have a git.kde.org ready to go using the same software.

I'd also like to make a mention in passing to some of our younger contributors: there are a few teenagers who contribute to KDE and Plasma out there. They often don't work at the same pace or with the same confidence as the older developers, but I admire their tenacity (they just keep banging away at the problems until they get it right) and their spirit of adventure. I remember the awe I felt when I got to work with others in industry on real world projects as a teenager and how I had to work extra hard (or so it felt at the time) to accomplish what seemed effortless for these experienced hands who were helping guide me through. It's wonderful that we have a similar spirit of mentorship and apprenticeship in KDE.

As for me, I'm in between conference calls and patch reviews at the moment. If things go well, I'll be able to spend my afternoon quietly coding. :)