Hello, Planet!

Hello, PlanetKDE! 

I'm Gabriel Poesia, a Brazilian Computer Science undergrad student at UFMG who is passionate about algorithms (I compete in programming contests, like ICPC) and free software. At the end of the last year, I started contributing to Nepomuk-KDE. I created this blog primarily to describe my first steps in the world of free software and talk about my work inside Nepomuk. Both writing here and contributing to KDE have been very interesting experiences for me, and I hope this blog can be useful and motivating to others, too. KDE is great, but still better than it is its community. There are very talented people working on it, and getting into it is a valuable opportunity to learn a lot about software development in general in real-world scenarios. The community is open and welcoming. That's easy to see while hanging on IRC!

In Nepomuk, until last month, I was mainly tackling minor issues, while understanding Nepomuk better. Today, I pushed NepomukCtl, a tool for controlling Nepomuk services, similar to akonadictl. Besides that, I'm working on making the FileWatcher service support different, independent back-ends. I'll probably participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, too! All this, of course, is not lone work. Help from fellow developers is always involved when working on KDE.

Nepomuk borrows many ideas and technologies from the Semantic Web (the name "Semantic Desktop" has a reason). Understanding the Semantic Web is very helpful when trying to grasp Nepomuk. So, I wrote a series of two posts about the Semantic Web. The first post (Oh, the Semantic Web... wait, what?) talks about its fundamental ideas, concepts and objectives. The second one (Making the Semantic Web work) goes a little deeper and shows how one would really implement those apparently abstract ideas. Many technologies cited there are indeed used in Nepomuk.

Well, that's it! I hope you enjoy my blog. You can find me on IRC, mainly in #kde-devel and #nepomuk-kde (my nickname is gpoesia there).