GSoC 2025 Wrap Up: Expanding the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment Website

Friday, 29 August 2025  |  Anish Tak

Intro

Hello everyone,
it’s me Anish, the mentee who has been working on the mentorship.kde.org
This is the final update within the official timeline of GSoC 2025 for my project: Expanding the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment Website.

A quick summary:
Over the past 11 weeks, I have worked on redesigning the KDE mentorship site into an onboarding and recruitment platform. In this post, I’ll mainly focus on the progress from Week 5 to Week 11 along with my final thoughts.

For earlier updates, you can check out my blog or for a short summary, this status report.

Week 5: Mentee Showcase Card

This week I worked on the mentee_card component to showcase past mentee projects from SoK and GSoC.

Each card shows the project name, mentee’s name, a short description, and some relevant tags(could be used later for filtering purposes). The structure is pretty similar to the already present /blog/ folder; to add a new showcase card, create a <mentee_name>.md file in the /mentee/ folder.

The idea behind this was to make the site feel more welcoming by showcasing success stories of contributors who started out as mentees.

mentee_card.png

Week 6: Light Mode Styling

This week was more about improvements rather than adding new stuff, my mentor Paul pointed out that the pages and designs I had done so far, had some issues in light mode, specifically text was not visible properly and in some cases borders were not visible.

So I added light mode support for all the three new pages:

  • /get-involved/
  • /mentees/
  • /resources/

After fixing the styles, both dark and light modes now work great.

light_mode.png
One of the new pages in light mode after fix

Week 7: Homepage Wireframe

This week was a bit light. Near the end of the week, I worked on a new wireframe for the homepage. It was basically just some colored divs arranged in an orderly fashion to get the initial structure in place.

To avoid overwriting the current homepage during development, I set it up at /home/, which acted as a sandbox to test different layouts before finalizing the design.

Week 8 + 9: Fixes and Merge

These weeks were more about refinement. I focused on improving small issues here and there, especially fixing the uneven height issue in mentee_card that came up with longer titles or descriptions.

We also moved all the work from the work/kny branch into master so that testing could be done properly.

Here’s the list of everything that got merged:

  • Dummy pages
  • course_card for /resources/
  • Pathway navigator in /get-involved/
  • mentee_card for /mentees/
  • Light mode styling for the new pages
  • Basic homepage wireframe at /home/

Week 10: Homepage Redesign

The long awaited homepage design finally dropped in. It looks clean and has a welcoming feel for new contributors. All credits to Farid for the design.

This week was a bit hectic and more code heavy.

I implemented the homepage from scratch, replacing the placeholder wireframe. The only tricky part was handling SVG files (it was my first time working with them), but with some tweaks I got them working(for large screens at least).

The responsiveness part took another week to sort out. For now, the homepage still has some content and links as placeholders since those are yet to be finalized.

I had to split the screenshot into three parts since the full page was too tall. If you want to see the complete image, here’s the link.

homepage1.png

homepage2.png

homepage3.png

Week 11: Responsive Layout

The work from last week continued, this time it was about making it responsive across different screen sizes.

I tested it on everything from mobile phones, tablets and desktops, and the layout now adapts properly everywhere.

With that, the core goals of the project were wrapped up.

My Own Development

I learned a lot from this project, both in coding and beyond. Here are the things I remember right now, though the list could go longer:

  • Now I am very comfortable with Hugo, semantic maps, and YAML files
  • Finally learned how to deal with SVGs (was my first time working with them)
  • My frontend skills improved, especially writing reusable components
  • Realized that seemingly small issues like the height mismatch in cards can actually eat up a lot of time.
  • I now think more about writing reusable code instead of quick fixes and hardcoding things
  • My communication skills got better, even picking up some English tips from Paul

Conclusion

Overall, GSoC 2025 has been a great experience for me. Over these 11 weeks I got the chance to work on reshaping the KDE Mentorship and Recruitment website into something more welcoming for new contributors.

Along the way I learned some technical skills, learned how to work across different timezones, to communicate better, and most importantly realized that long discussions are often more necessary than jumping straight into implementation, especially in open source communities.

Big thanks to my mentors Paul Brown and Farid Abdelnour for guiding me, and to the KDE community for being supportive throughout.

This wraps up my GSoC journey, but I will be sticking around KDE and plan to explore other projects, especially Plasma. See you around in the community.

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