I would like to be a mentor. I would describe my KDE programming skills as moderate. I write patches and I am a little bit more active in kile development, but I am no maintainer or something like this. But what should be the topics? It is feature freeze, so we have to discuss bug fixing first. Perhaps we can start with a junior job from bugs.kde.org and discuss it in a thread in a seperate forum? Any ideas how to start?

Well, first we have to create a group. I say "we" because I'm obviously interested. However, I don't know if my skills are good enough - I only know a little bit C++ and Qt, barely enough to make a very simple application.

A separate thread would be good, and maybe an IRC channel.

As I said, I think a group of 3-5 people would be best, excluding the mentor. (That doesn't mean that 6-7 people would be a catastrophe, my estimate is only based on my previous experience of group work in school).

To get the best result, the group members should have similar interest (e.g.fixing KWin), level of ambition (n bugs/week) and roughly the same programming experience. In my opinion.

msoeken, since you're the mentor I think you should create a new thread and ask for "students".

Myself
Interest: I think Plasma (plus its components) and KDE games would be a good starting point for a newbie like me. However, fixing various small bugs in other applications wouldn't be bad either.
Ambition: It's a little bit hard to say, but perhaps 1-2 bug(s)/week. I'm a little bit busy at the moment, and it won't get better in December. But I usually check the forum every day.
Programming: I know the basics of C++. If you look at this list of tutorials, I would say I'm somewhere around Friendship and inheritance and Polymorphism.
My Qt skills are worse. I've played around in Designer and know a little bit about signals/slots, but that's about it.

I love this idea! I wanted to help contribute to KDE as well, and I've started learning C++ and Python. However, after searching around repeatedly around the various techbase websites and stuff, I'm still at a bit of a loss as to how to start.

I personally think that a 1-1 newbie:mentor ratio is perfect. Guided step by step (ok, first get SVN, then try out this bug, whatever), via some sort of instant messaging program or Skype would be wonderful!

Not exactly sure whether I should clog up this "idea" thread into a "requests" thread, but here goes:

I am a newbie. I am looking for a mentor. I have started learning C++ and Python, and capable of writing simple command line programs with it. I don't currently use KDE-SVN, but looking forward to, and I run Gentoo Linux. I have had previous programming experience with PHP (quite a lot). I have a lot of experience in graphic works, but I would prefer to learn how to contribute via programming before graphics.

I think it'll be best if any mentors just send me a PM, it'll be a bit weird to post replies to requests like these here.

Looking forward to a mentor!

See [thread=16220]this thread[/thread] and please vote for it.

Sorry for what might seem like a meaningless bump, but it's all well and good about the weekly sessions, but I'm sure there are others like me who would also prefer low student:mentor ratios with voluntary coding guru mentors. Perhaps we can decide on some sort of system where people can say either "I am a mentor, looking for students", or "I am a student, looking for a mentor". It seems to have hit a standstill at the moment - and I'm sure this can really become great for KDE dev!

We already have something in the queue, so stay tuned. The good thing about a forum is, everybody can jump in. So if we held a classroom you are interested in, simply jump in.
For the future of course we can do some sort of poll to fit your (the students) needs. But at first we need to find mentors, currently 2 contacted me. And both of them already made drafts for first test courses.

I am anxiously waiting to learn something..

Well, if you have an idea about what you want to learn and it was not already mentioned, be sure to add a comment to the poll in showthread.php?tid=16220

But for now i recommend the great material on http://techbase.kde.org , it's full of tutorials, beginners guides, guidelines, hints etc.

Hi, i use gnome and not kde, because kde4 runs very slowly on my old system, and now i can guess it is because so many developers of kde prefer using scripting lunguages. in my opinion it is wrong approught.

If your old system uses NVidia please update your drivers. Apparently a recent release corrected this. Most code in the KDE modules uses native C++.