Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020 coding phase starts next week and I am going to participate as a student, working on the graph layout capabilities of the Graph Theory IDE Rocs. Rocs is a KDE software which provides various features for working with graphs and simulating graph algorithms in a visual way, which can be useful for students and researchers.

I created this blog mainly to share my experience during this project. For the next 3 months, I am going write about graph layout (or graph drawing) algorithms, Rocs, developing software for KDE and Google Summer of Code. This is my first experience blogging. Maybe I will enjoy it and start writing about other topics as well.

During the last weeks, I have been preparing to start working on Rocs as a GSoC student. I am new to open source development and, consequently, to KDE. Therefore, I spent some time learning about KDE and how it operates. The KDE Community Wiki Polices page was really useful. There, I found guidelines related to software development in KDE, including coding style and commit polices.

Many KDE applications, including Rocs, are developed using Qt, which I was not very familiar with. Although I would like to have studied more, I got the basics of Qt. I hope this will reduce substantially the amount of time I will spend reading the documentation during this project.

Finally, besides the community and software development subjects, I also studied graph layout algorithms. More specifically, I studied graph layout algorithms based on physical analogies, which are the ones I am going to work with during the first phase of the project. I am planning to write about some of these algorithms next week.

I am really excited about this project and about becoming part of the amazing KDE Community. I hope everything goes well during the next months of GSoC coding phase.