Highlighting community contributions to the Quantum Development Kit

In July 2019, we updated the Quantum Development Kit (QDK) to be fully open-source and invited the community to help shape the developer tools that will empower users to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. We’re excited to highlight some great community contributions in the last month.

Our Quantum Katas have been a big hit with new learners, and we are delighted to see contributions to the Kata notebooks. Running the Katas in Jupyter Notebooks provides a great experience to actively engage with teaching material along with programming exercises to learn Q#. If you would like to try out the Katas for yourself, you can do so directly from your browser. We’re grateful to our community for assuring the Notebook experience is available across all our Katas.

Also in July, we saw strong participation in projects hosted by the Quantum Team at Microsoft’s One Week Hackathon. The One Week Hackathon is a yearly event where Microsoft employees come together to collaborate on a wide variety of projects. The Microsoft Quantum Team hosted several hacks where we invited employees and interns from across the company to contribute to the open-source QDK.

The Hackathon produced many valuable contributions to the QDK, such as new support for richer code actions in the compiler. These exciting additions will help create a more intuitive user experience, especially for beginner Q# developers. We will be shipping these features developed by the community as part of our 0.9 QDK release.