GSoC 2025: Expanding the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment Website

Tuesday, 1 July 2025  |  Anish Tak

Intro

Hi everyone, My name is Anish Tak, I am an undergrad Engineer from India, majoring in Biosciences. My journey with KDE began last year December, with a small contribution to LabPlot. Soon, I discovered about Season of KDE, which was my first time collaborating remotely, and it was great.

Fortunately, my proposal was accepted for GSoC, and over the next 12 weeks, I'll be working on "Expanding the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment Website." and will be sharing my journey here bi-weekly(hopefully).

About the project

The project, Expanding the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment Website, mainly focuses on two things:

  1. Redesign the KDE Mentorship website with a modern and user-friendly UI that provides information about KDE’s mentorship programs,learning resources and ways to contribute to KDE.

  2. Turning the current KDE Mentorship site into a onboarding and recruitment platform, aligned with "KDE needs you" goal, this mainly includes developing a personalized contributor recommendation system.

Community Bonding + Starting Three Weeks

In the bonding period I tried to study and play around with HuGo, than I tried to setup the repo and check if it was building and thankfully everything went smoothly.

Week 1: Site Structure Planning

In the first week I focused on understanding the higher level structure of possible future website. I took the initial mind map and tried grouping the nodes in sensible ways, mapped how each page would connect with others, added some new nodes while detaching a few that didn’t fit.

Once the mind map looked good, I created the dummy pages in the repo with titles and placeholder content, which gave a navigable version of the site.

mentorship_website_mindmap.png

Week 2: Card Template

In the second week, I worked on building a reusable course_card component. A small card which could be used to showcase programs or resources(mainly courses). It also has tags which will make them easier to sort, if in future a sorting filter is added.For now, it will be used to either link to or display beginner friendly instructions for KDE native frameworks like Kirigami and KXmlGui.

In further weeks, these instructions might be directly embedded from develop.kde.org or written on the site itself. The goal was to build a flexible card component that could be used in multiple contexts in future

course_card.png

Week 3 + 4: Get Involved Pathway

Week 3 didn’t involve much work as mentors were a bit busy, so I used the time to review some parts of the codebase and prepare for upcoming changes.

In Week 4, I edited the "Get Involved" section and added a step-by-step navigator to help users find appropriate paths based on how they want to get started.

It starts with “How would you like to get started?” and (for now) leads users to

While the UI is still a placeholder, and some links and headers need to be updated, the basic flow is in place

What's Next

In the upcoming weeks, we will try to:

  • Extending the contributor path to more level deep
  • Updating the placeholder links and headers
  • Implementing the new design layout
  • Collecting beginner-friendly resources for resources page

How to Reach Me