Past

First Krita sprint that I attended was back in 2010, in Netherlands, Deventer. We were hosted by Krita maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt. The main topic back then was to define product vision for Krita . It was a great idea to invite Peter Sikking. He helped us define very cool vision for Krita. If you have a vision, you can decide easily what to include into your application, what to implement and what can be provided by external applications. It helps you to decide whether you have to agree with user complaining in bug report or not.

Next Krita sprint was in 2011. The location was very cool: Blender Instituite, Netherlands, Amsterdam. For me the most important moment from that sprint was when artists (Timothee, David Revoy,…) demonstrated how they use Krita. It helped us to identify the biggest problems, focus us on polishing parts of Krita that were causing problems for professional painters. We managed to fix those issues since then, Krita has changed a lot since then, it is used by professionals these days!

Timothee painted me in his painting session on the roof

We failed to organize Krita sprint 2012 in Bilbao, Boud and me were too busy. We probably did not plan Krita sprint 2013 for the very same reason.

Present

Krita sprint 2014 was held in Netherlands, Deventer again. We were hosted by Boud and Irina and it was as great as back in 2010. I arrived on Friday, 16th of May. After travelling for a little bit more than 11 hours using public transport, I managed to arrive to Deventer safely. Train, tram, bus, airplane and train and there I was! When I plan such a journey, I tend to add time paddings to have enough time for travel connections, so that’s why it takes so long. My traveling agony was healed by Wi-Fi almost everywhere!

The main discussion was on Saturday and it is nicely described in DOT KDE article. I personally was wondering how Krita Foundation is doing. So far Krita Foundation is not able to employ all Krita hackers full-time, but I hope one day it will be possible!

One of the steps towards that goal is Krita Kickstarter: it will allow our community developers Dmitry and Sven to work on Krita full-time for a longer time period. I hope it will be a huge success and maybe next fund-raiser will allow more community developers (e.g. me ) to work on Krita full-time again. Well, it is more complicated for me now when I have my own family, my wife and a little son to care about.

There are full-time developers who work on Krita projects commercially in KO Gmbh: Boud, who is the maintainer of Krita and few employees, who entered Krita development through KO Gmbh: Stuart, Leinir and Arjen. First two were also present at the sprint! Their work is mostly on Krita Sketch, Krita Gemini and Krita on Steam and this commercial work is feeding them. All their work on Krita is open-source development!

We had nice lunch outside together on Saturday. Then we had hacking time til dinner and after dinner. I was working on G’MIC integration into Krita. This time I was fixing problems with internet filter definition updates. Then I spent some time with Dmitry discussing problems I faced when integrating G’mic into Krita. There are some use-cases that our processing framework, responsible for multi-threaded processing of the layers in Krita, is not counting on: I suppose that it is because we did not have enough focus on image filters. Krita is painting application and filters are usually needed for photo-manipulation. But painters also need to post-process their paintings, so that’s why I’m working on G’mic integration.

Sunday was dedicated to artists: Steven, Timothee and Wolthera showing us how they use Krita, what they struggle with and what can be better. Observing artists using Krita allowed us to see where Krita is right now. In 2011 it was not yet suitable for professional painting, in 2014 we could see that Krita made it into professional league of painting applications.

We spent some time just hanging around and discussing stuff around Krita. We had nice walk to the park, spent time on the roof of our hosting place or walked in the town. It was great to meet old friends and meet some new faces.

We also got some presents from Krita Foundation, nice t-shirts for everybody, one t-shirt was  made specially for my little son — thank you! I brought something for Irina and Boud: some Slovak cheese products and slovak wine – oštiepok was especially enjoyed by Boud and Irina.

Big thank you goes to Boudewijn and Irina for excellent hosting and to KDE e.V. for making the sprint possible.

Related Krita sprint 2014 blogs:
Timothee: http://timotheegiet.com/blog/floss/a-report-from-the-krita-sprint-2014.html
Sven: http://slangkamp.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/krita-sprint-2014/
Dmitry: http://dimula73.blogspot.sk/2014/06/some-notes-from-krita-sprint-2014.html
Boud: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kimageshop/2014-May/012313.html
Dot KDE Article: https://dot.kde.org/2014/06/04/2014-krita-sprint-deventer-netherlands