Every year Red Hat Czech offers a list of topics for bachelor and diploma theses to students from local universities. The topics are usually suggested and posted by Red Hat employees who then work with the students as technical consultants and mentors.

We see this as a good opportunity for students to learn about open source software, communities and collaboration and for us to find potential future employees :-) (so there’s a great motivation too). We want students not to see their diploma or bachelor thesis as some boring obligation, but rather a “fun” way to learn new things, meet people and gain experience. And last but not least they are potential contributors to the projects they are involved in.

This year I managed to get several students I’m mentoring to pick a topic related to KDE.  Although all projects are somehow related to KDE Telepathy, it’s a good start ;-)

Today I want to introduce work of first two students, Stanislav Láznička and Artur Dębski.

Makneto++

Stanislav Láznička is doing his bachelor thesis on Brno University of Technology. His topic is “Shared Board - Makneto”, more specifically, his task is to port Makneto to Telepathy. Makneto is a whiteboard-sharing application for KDE, similar to KWhiteboard. It has been written some time ago as a diploma thesis. Since then several students have based their theses on this project (not all of them successfully though). Stanislav is now researching how to use the Telepathy framework and preparing to start the actual port soon. If you are interested in further progress, follow his blog and his git repo on bitbucket.

KTp Active

Artur Dębski (IRC: mentero), a student from Silesian University of Technology in Poland. His topic is “Touch interface for KDE Telepathy”. Yes, hang on to your hat, we are going to have a totally awesome Plasma Active application for Instant Messaging. Artur has written an extensive blogpost about his work together with some mockups. You can checkout the existing code from here, there’s already a demo app to play with!