Programmes like Season of KDE (SoK) and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) provide a great opportunity for young talent to become part of the open source community and contribute to open source projects. LabPlot, and KDE in general, has a long history and experience in managing GSoC projects and has benefited from various contributions. In recent years we have taken a break from GSoC, mostly due to personal reasons and time constraints. After a successful SoK 2024 programme this year we decided to participate in GSoC2024 again.

This year we had Israel Gladima and Kuntal Bar who spent 3 months with us working on quite challenging projects aimed at addressing two major feature gaps in LabPlot, namely Python scripting and visualisation of 3D data. These two development topics had already been the subject of several discussions and even initial implementations on our part, but we never managed to finalise them and make these features available to our users. Based on the already available results of the last years’ work, we decided to re-initiate these projects and work on them during GSoC2024. Despite the technical challenges and complexity of these projects, Kuntal and Israel did a very good job this summer and delivered amazing results.

We refer you to their blog posts here and here for more details of the work that has been done. In the coming weeks and months we’ll continue to work to finalise these features and get them ready for the first release. The LabPlot team would like to thank Israel and Kuntal and we’re looking forward to your contributions in the future!