Working on Krita: Fun & profit

Speaker: Lukas Tvrdy

I'm former Google Summer Of Code student and now regular Krita contributor and part of the core development team. Google Summer Of Code 2008 was the entrance for the open-source development for me. I liked my project Sumi-e brush engine so much that I continued to work on Krita in my spare time as hobby and regular contributor. I work on brush engines most of the time. One years ago I decided that my master thesis will be about Krita, specifically about brush engines. That way I could find more time for my hobby and also profit - have the interesting topic for my thesis. I was motivated also by getting GSoC slot for the second time in 2009.
I was improving Krita's usability with painting.  Last year I proposed to work on Krita full-time for some time period inspired by Durian project in Blender community. With the support of the team we asked the KDE and open-source graphics community for donations for full-time Krita developer. Our aim was to make Krita much more faster and usable for Blender people. Our target has been reached, but we have still a lot of work ahead.
My talk would be about being the GSoC student through thesis work til being community paid full-time developer. The results of my work on Krita will be demonstrated.

Lukas Tvrdy

Lukáš from Slovakia is a 24 year old student of computer science at VŠB - Technical University of Ostrava. His focus is on computer graphics and software engineering. He is graduating this year in June and his diploma thesis is about brush engines in KDE painting application Krita. His contribution to KDE started with Google Summer Of Code 2008 and still continues. The area of his contribution is development of Krita. He loves to experiment with computer graphics with the aim of bringing some innovations and Krita was found to be great environment for that. Currently he is working on improving Krita, so that it will be usable also for professional artists. Nobody knows what future holds for him, a new job as a software engineer or software developer is the most probable.