Welcome Elie and thanks for joining the mailing list.
We talk about development of Inkscape quite often here and lots can be learned about the structure of inkscape from these dscussions.
Are there simple little tasks that I could try to achieve in order to get more familiar with it ? Tasks that would not require a complete understanding of the entire code.
Yes, I split my learning between two pages, the first is to watch other people's commits on this page:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/inkscape/trunk/changes
It's a really good way to see what's going into inkscape and when people make mistakes and how they're fixing those mistakes.
And the second part is bug fixing using this link:
There are some very small bugs which can be fixed right away by someone new. There's also cleanup of the code, moving from char * to std::ustring, using vectors instead of GSList, some more objectification of code. These depend on your C++ experience etc.
But I can also help in other way than patching the core soft, with some web dev or translation. I suscribed to the translator mailing-list too but I don't know exactly how it works, how to find what to translate, etc. For example the new next-release page has obviously not been translated in French (which is my mother language) but what am I supposed to do if I want to translate it ?
I look after the website and it's a python/django website who's code lives in the inkscape-web project:
https://code.launchpad.net/~inkscape-web
I'm upgrading the news app currently to support translations and to be able to report missing translations. Improving the website's capabilities especially with translations is on my critical roadmap.
Setting up a local instance of the website is as easy as grabbing the code and running the init script.
Hope this information helps!
Best Regards, Martin Owens