The Sprint
Hi -)) haven't posted for some time, because I was busy travelling and coding for the first half of the month. From Aug 5 to Aug 9, I went to the Krita Sprint in Deventer, Netherlands.
According to Halla, I was the first person to arrive. My flight took a transit via Hong Kong where some flights were affected due to natural and social factors, but fortunately mine was not one of them. Upon arrival in Amsterdam I got a ticket for the Intercity to Deventer. Railway constructions made me take a transfer via Utrecht Centraal, but that was not a problem at all: the station has escalators going both up to the hall, and down to the platforms (in China you can only go to the hall by stairs or elevator (which is often crowded after you get off)). When I got out of Deventer Station, Halla immediately recognized me (how?!). It was early in the morning, and the street's quietness was broken by the sound of me dragging my suitcase. Halla led me through Deventer's crooked streets and alleys to his house.
For the next two days people gradually arrived. I met my main mentor Dmitry (magician!) and his tiger, Sagoskatt, which I (and many others) have mistaken for a giraffe. He was even the voice actor for Sago. He had got quite a lot of insights into the code base (according to Halla, "80%") and solved a number of bugs in Krita (but he said he introduced a lot of bugs, ha!). Also I met David Revoy (my favourite painter!), the author of Pepper and Carrot. And Tiar, our developer who started to work full-time on Krita this year; she had always been volunteering to support other Krita users and always on the IRC and Reddit. And two of other three GSoC students for the year: Blackbeard (just as his face) and Hellozee. Sh_zam could not come and lost communications due to political issues, which was really unfortunate (eh at least now he can be connected). It is feels so good to be able to see so many people in the community -- they are so nice! And it is such an experience to hack in a basement church.
On Aug 7 we went to the Open Air Museum. It displays a large extent of the history in the Netherlands, how their people lived. After a really delicious lunch we went out and started to do paintings. I was to paint on my Surface using Krita, but unfortunately it went out of battery so I had to gave up and painted on a postcard. The tram in the museum is my favourite one (I am always fond of transit) and they even have a carhouse where stood lots of old vehicles. Except for my head which hit the ceiling of the coach three times, everything that day was wonderful.
The next day was the main meeting. In the morning we discussed the development plans for Krita. Bugs. Stability. New features. David Revoy came up again with the docker size problem, which Halla simply called it "a Qt problem." He said, "Yes I do know what to do with that, but new users probably don't and thus we gotta address it and not solely blame Qt." (Yeah it troubled me a lot as well!) Another thing closely related to me was building on Windows, which was largely neglected by KDE. In the afternoon the focus shifted to marketing. I did not know much about it, but it is a fact that we cannot produce electricity out of love. We spent quite a lot of time on the painting competition for Krita. Where it should be held. How to collect the paintings. How to filter out good pictures. Krita promotes new artists. They promote our software.
For the next two days people started leaving. I left on the 10th, and then slept for a whole day when I got to Nanjing (so tired...). On Aug 14th I left again for Toronto, and then restarted to write code and debug. I finally got the time to write this post today, as I finally fixed a crash in my project. It is almost finished, and soon another post would be made on it.