digiKam & KIPI coding sprint 2009. Photo by Johannes Wienke.

I just came back from the digiKam / KDE imaging coding sprint in Essen, Germany. My main goal was to start working on an export plugin to Wikimedia Commons from digiKam, which can be a wonderful tool for Wikimedia photographers.

I met a lot of great people there, and it was really nice to benefit from their experience. I learnt a lot during these three days, and being in the same room as other developers made it a lot easier to work together.

By analyzing how the existing Facebook KIPI plugin was made, I was able to create the basis of the communication layer between the plugin and a MediaWiki site, even though I had not done any C++/Qt development before. Admittedly, I had some existing knowledge of Lisp, Java and C, but it was old and limited; I was quite happy to advance so quickly. While my current work focuses on a specific wiki (Wikimedia Commons), it could be later extended to a more general MediaWiki library for Qt.

Special kudos and Vielen Dank to Marcel Wiesweg, who organized the whole event. Everything went great, we had a pretty good Internet connection and we even ate well! (one thing you wouldn’t necessarily expect during a coding event). The trip back was also fun.