 KDE is hiring a software engineer and that's kind of a surprise actually kind of like this is in discontinuity to what KDE EV has been doing for quite some time but it is in line with the more recent trends so let's see what is going on. So it's not like KDE hadn't hired anybody before rather usually up to like one year ago all of the people that were hired were people working on non-technical areas such as the promotion of KDE or writing documentation or you know managing the legal side of things this kind of things never actually working on the software and back then as far as I know that was actually a choice that was done by the community because hiring developers did bring some complexities that had to be addressed however more recently there has been the push to actually start hiring people to work on the code base so if you're out of the loop you might be asking wait does that mean that KDE does not currently pay any developer to work on KDE code and answer is yes actually right now there's nobody paid by KDE working on KDE code as far as I'm aware rather there's people either working on the free time like like me or people that are paid by external companies to work on KDE software but that said this should change it. These software engineers should work on like KDE frameworks, Plasma, Qt, middleware like PapuWire, Wayland protocols these kind of things which is very much KDE stuff so that is exciting but at the same time one might ask okay wait a sec who is paying for that so how is KDE going as far as money is concerned so first of all let me say that this position is not actually full time it is 20 hours per week so that is already somewhat that is the cost somewhat but still KDE does need to step up a bit its fundraising platform and there has been changes in this direction which I have been very interesting. As a matter of fact you can donate right now there's an ongoing campaign which you can find at kde.org slash blue friday yes blue friday and the thing is up until now to actually donate anything to KDE you had to do like a one time donation that was the only thing supported and if you wanted to do a recurring payment you had to use relate.kde.org which is less user friendly and it has always been weird to have these two things in two different places now KDE has started using donor box which here has also been used to make an example for the KDE live campaign now it is not like all beautiful and simple keep in mind that donor box has the tool that allows us to take donations does take a percentage of the donations I think like I'm pretty sure but that's really impossible to avoid to make a more concrete example of numbers that I can actually talk about if you donate to me like personally to me through PayPal people usually it's like five to ten percent if you do it via Patreon Patreon usually takes between 15 and 20 percent if you donate via YouTube they usually take something like 45% so yeah so it is rather normal for a tool like donor box to take a percentage of the things however if you manage thanks to tool like donor box donor box which is very simple to use and also allows you to make recurring payments if a lot of people find that tool easy to use and lots of people donate thanks to the fact that we have that tool even if part of that goes to donor box we still see an increase in donation and it's all very cool for us in fact currently I think we're going at like 500 euros in just a day or two so let me check we are at 800 euros currently which is super nice in just two days so if you do want to donate to Katie please do it would be a very nice thing if you use Katie you can do so at Katie.org slash Blue Friday and this kind of initiatives is what will allow us Katie to hire more people hopefully and it's kind of like one of the very first technical hireings now technically Katie did hire Ingo Cloaker I think it's pronounced I think to maintain and improves Katie's packaging infrastructure that was a bit ago I don't remember when exactly so it's not like the very first thing but this is a significant step forward so I don't know you're excited of course you should think of applying if you've like maybe used Katie so that you get an idea if you have any experience in like C++ QT these are the tools that Katie uses if you have any idea of the background of Katie as in like the frameworks these kind of things apply please do I wonder if I should apply I don't know should I apply