A fitting beginning to my journey as any, if the purists will forgive me for not properly representing my IOStream #include.

As is appropriate to any beginning allow me first to introduce myself and then to introduce my cause, to which I will hopefully attract you. My name is Chris Johnson though as you may have guessed by now I will be masquerading here as the proverbial “Little Blue Penguin” himself. I am an avid programmer and all-around computer enthusiast having tinkered, broken, fixed (in most cases), and generally loved everything electronic since an early age. My employment however has always kept me as a Windows (.NET) developer. Recently however, a good friend has extended me a wonderful offer: Red pill, or blue?

Least this be the briefest blog in Internet history I chose the red one.

Much like Neo himself though, I quickly found myself disoriented, overwhelmed even. Which “distro” should I choose, which language should I focus on learning first? Dozens of resources were available for these questions but many were out of date, contradictory, or otherwise unhelpful in my fledgling state. Never fear though, there is light at the end of this tunnel!

The recent employment I mentioned that had me stuck in the Win32 world has, more recently, ended. Moving on to bigger and better things I found myself in a shop that needed not only the skill set that I had, but the one that I could have now that I have taken that delicious red pill and started the journey. With the ever powerful motivation of looking good to a manager (especially one that signs your check) I have resettled my goals of learning this brave new world from two fronts.

It is on those fronts, dear reader, where I hope to engage you. The thoughts and guidance of you older gurus has already proven invaluable to me, everything from selecting my distro to getting it installed and everything working. However my focus, not to offend those selfsame gurus, is more on the new user; the Little Blue Penguins themselves. While I am still very, very much a little blue penguin myself what I hope to build here is a trail; a guide for those developers who like myself want to make the switch but hit a wall and stop out of frustration. I hope that what I..no, We, can build here is a doorway through that wall.

Over the next months (if not years!) I plan to document my journey into this new world; the world of KDE, C++ programming, and the trials of a lifelong Windows developer trying to make the switch. My goal in these posts will be to highlight not only what I am learning but where the KDE community could improve that aforementioned doorway to allow more uses to come across and begin to contribute to the project as I so want to. Make note however that it is not my intention to call down these suggestions from some ivory tower, instead my commitment to the community is to take these blogs, the comments and help that I have received so far and hope to continue to receive, and the things that I learn throughout this trip and in turn help to make that doorway larger, wider, and more accessible to all who arrive at it.

I plan initially to help work on the new user documentation available on the KDE Techbase, where I first started my journey. A lot of good information is available in those guides but many things still exist there that create rocky starts. As a user coming over from the world of Windows these shortcomings are painfully obvious to me because they are where I am stumbling myself. Rather than leave those loose stones for others to trip on later however I have realized, with the encouragement of that same friend mentioned above, that I could make my first contributions to KDE without even having to learn C++ and instead could focus initially on helping improve the new user experience.

Much to his delight I have taken this charge up as my own, I plan to keep my learnings here while I am in this beginner stages hoping that you readers will help me fill in the gaps that I am missing. From there I will take what I have gained and turn it into a map that others may follow.

It’s going to be a long but enjoyable ride I know and I hope to have many of you along for the trip, both as backseat drivers and frontseat learners.

-chrisj

P.S. I hope you will forgive the length of this first post but, as you know, we only get one shot at a first impression; I hope I have made one here that will both inspire and draw you into to stay for a while.