Season of KDE 2026: Transforming mentorship.kde.org into a Complete Onboarding System

Eight weeks ago I was nervously setting up a Hugo project I'd never touched before, reading through someone else's merge requests trying to understand what I was supposed to build on top of. Today, mentorship.kde.org is a meaningfully better place for anyone trying to find their way into the KDE community. That's a good feeling.

I'm Advaith, a second-year Computer Science student from India. This was my first time contributing to open source and I couldn't have picked a better place to start than KDE.

The project

My task for Season of KDE 2026 was to transform mentorship.kde.org into a proper onboarding system for new contributors. The foundation was already there thanks to @drowsywings's GSoC 2025 work, but several pages had placeholder content, buttons went nowhere, and there was no real sense of flow.

I know this because I was that confused visitor. I found this project by experiencing the problem it was trying to solve, which made working on it feel genuinely worthwhile.

I worked alongside my co-contributor Aryan Rai. Aryan handled the /programs and /resources pages, while I focused on the homepage and the /mentees showcase. Splitting things up early was one of the better decisions we made. It kept us from stepping on each other's work and meant we could move independently for most of the program.

What got built

The homepage work was mostly about making things actually work the way they were supposed to: routing buttons to real pages, filling in content that had been sitting as placeholders, making the news section feel like actual news. A lot of it sounds simple when described but the details add up fast.

The /mentees page was the more interesting challenge. It went from being essentially empty to having real data, pagination, and client-side filtering by year, program, and technology. The filtering was originally a stretch goal but I'm glad it made it in.

One decision that took more thought than I expected was how to store the mentee data. I went back and forth between grouping mentees into cohort files (one file per year/program) versus individual Markdown files per mentee. The grouped approach is simpler to manage at first, but individual files make filtering far more straightforward, as Hugo can use front matter fields like year, program, and technology directly as filter parameters without any external code. That made the choice clear.

My mentors Anish Tak and Paul Brown were genuinely great to work with. Paul introduced us to the project and set the direction early on and Anish carried that through the whole program by hosting bi-weekly meets, reviewing all our MRs, and always being available when we we were stuck. I'm really grateful to both of them for making this such a good first experience in open source.

What I take away

The biggest thing I learned isn't a technical skill, it's how to work inside something that already exists. Reading a codebase you didn't write, making changes that fit the patterns already there, coordinating with someone else so your work doesn't clash with theirs. These things don't come up much when you're building projects on your own, and SoK taught me that in a way no tutorial could. I came in knowing how to write code. I left knowing how to write code that other people have to maintain.

I also just really enjoyed it. The KDE community is welcoming in a way that makes you want to stick around, and I intend to.

What's next

There's still work to be done on mentorship.kde.org. The pathway navigator deserves more attention, not all previous mentee data has been added and there's always more mentee data to add, as new program cycles wrap up. I'd like to be part of it.

If you're a student sitting on the fence about contributing, mentorship.kde.org (and in the future join.kde.org) exists to help you take that step. Hopefully it's a little easier to navigate now :)