Hello world Planet!¶
My name is Matija Šuklje 1, but geeks call me Hook 2. I have been lurking around KDE and using it since its 2.x (or 1.x) times and in the many years mostly contributed by submitting nasty bug reports 3, suggesting crazy ideas and here and there helping translate KDE software into my mother tongue – Slovenian.
As a (very soon to be) lawyer with very limited coding skills, that is as much as I could have done for the community so far.
But in the past years, I got lucky and got employed by the FSFE to lead the FSFE Legal team. Since the FLA that KDE e.V. uses was made in tight cooperation with FSFE, I finally had an excuse to go to Akademy found a way to help out the KDE community with my skills and hold a lightning talk on how the FLA works and why KDE gearheads should sign it (video).
My very first commit to KDE ☺¶
After helping with a recent local KDE translation sprint, Andrej Mernik suggested that I should ask for direct commit access to the KDE localisations SVN, so I do not bug him or Andrej Vernekar to commit translations for me.
So I did, and Andrej Vernekar later supported my application and shortly thereafter Víctor Blázquez welcomed me with a nice new developer package. It is great to see the KDE community so welcoming to newcomers! ☺
Excited by my new powers, as soon as time let me, I fired up the trusty 4 Lokalize and started translating some of the packages that have been in my ToDo list for a long time now.
Just a few hiccups with my OpenPGP card setup, and the first ever commit to KDE repositories, signed with my name, was on-line. Ah, what a thrill!
Sign(ed) the FLA¶
Haha!
you might think,
Now we have you! Have you signed the FLA that you tell us all is such a great idea?
… and you would have all the reasons to ask.
And the answer is: Yes, of course, I contacted KDE e.V., where Albert Astals Cid answered me, I printed the copies, signed and sent them just a week after my first commit!
While I was filling it out, I did realise that the document needs to be a bit easier to read and understand. So I took notes of that and in the relatively near future am going to try to come up with a few suggestions how to make the FLA even better 5. This also means, I would very much welcome any feedback from the wider community on the text.
hook out → I wish I had time to go to Akademy 2014 as well …see you next year!
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I know it not easy to pronounce. Matija is the Slovenian equivalent of Matthias (and is pronounced the same, just drop the S). As for Šuklje, it sounds a bit like “shoe kle” in “shoe kleptomaniac”, but has nothing to do with it. ↩
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On FreeNode I go under the nickname silver_hook and for other ways to get in touch, feel free to check my contacts page. ↩
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I have a knack for finding bugs – in digital as well as real life. One of the funnier occasions was at Akademy 2013, where I managed to find and coherently replicate a bug in one of the elevators in the place where most of participants were staying. Together with David E. “DMaggot” Narváez we also found a workaround and submitted the bug to the local person in charge. ↩
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Lokalize might slowly be in need of a few visual improvements and better documentation, but it still is an awesome tool for localisation. ↩
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Full disclaimer: The FLA is part of my work for FSFE as well as the topic of my LLM thesis. ↩