Friday, June 29, 2007

Summer of Coders at Google: Pawel Solyga

During his recent visit to Google HQ, Pawel Solyga was kind enough to treat us to a presentation and record a podcast. You can learn more about Pawel's Summer of Code projects, past and present, and the WinLibre project from the video of his talk: Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch.

You can check out the podcast to hear Pawel discuss more about his Summer of Code work. You'll also get an early taste of cool things he wants to do with MacFUSE.

You can directly download the podcast or subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

Thursday, June 28, 2007

DebConf 7 & Summer of Code

DebConf 7 just wrapped up last week and Summer of Coders were out in force. Andrew Stribblehill, one of Google's software engineers, was kind enough to send us a report from the conference:


Google was pleased to support the recent Debian Conference, held this
year in Edinburgh. Ten Googlers, six of us Debian Developers, attended
and thoroughly enjoyed it. Google is pleased to encourage the kind of
community involvement that DebConf fosters.

Google also supports Debian through the Summer of Code initiative.
There were over a hundred proposals and we winnowed them down to the
best nine. These include work to help Debian's QA team, a live CD
project and a system which tests the snapshot CD images for
correctness. Debian derives value not just from the project funding
but also from the Summer of Code structure -- self-contained projects
with a clear goal, oversight and reporting.

What was special for us about DebConf is that it gave our Summer of
Code participants, both mentors and students, possibly their only
opportunity to meet face to face. We find this can be a great source
of encouragement after a few months' hacking in relative isolation.

It was an excellent conference. Until Debconf 8!


Thanks to Andrew for sending in the report. If any of the Summer of Coders who attended DebConf 7 want to share their experiences, just post a comment.

Summer of Coders at Google: Robert Watson

Robert Watson, organization administrator and mentor for the FreeBSD project, recently visited Google and treated our employees to a talk on "How the FreeBSD Project Works." Robert's talk provided insights into FreeBSD's governance as whole, and his remarks on FreeBSD's processes for onboarding new developers and how their existing structures aided the project's participation in Summer of Code are of particular interest. You can check out the video of Robert's presentation to learn more.

And for those of you who are wondering, you won't necessarily be talked into recording a podcast if you visit Google Mountain View. We might just persuade you to give a talk. Or you can talk us into hosting your talk. Either way works.

Seriously though, when any Summer of Coders are in the Mountain View area, you are most welcome to visit and give a presentation to Googlers about your Summer of Code project or your other open source activities. You know where to find us.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Summer of Coders at Google: Desmond Elliott

You've probably already heard about all the cool stuff you can do if you visit our Mountain View, California USA Headquarters: help yourself to a delicious free lunch, check out our replica of SpaceShipOne or take a look at our corporate solar panel installation. If you're a Summer of Coder, though, you're likely to be talked into a recording a podcast.

Desmond Elliott visited a few weeks ago and I got to catch up with him about his work on the Camino project for SoC 2006 and his plans for working with OpenMRS this year. Desmond also has the usual sage advice for would-be Summer of Code students and some thoughts on our first SoC podcast with Angie Byron from the Drupal project.


You can directly download the podcast or subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Summer Status

While we're used to reading status updates on mailing lists or hammering out next steps in IRC, Sidnei da Silva has done one better; he's recorded a video status report on his Summer of Code project, including an overview of Plone, Zope and his efforts to improve WebDAV in Plone.

Speaking of status, midterm evaluations for the program are coming up in just under two weeks. We're looking forward to hearing more about all the progress our students have made thus far and learning more about mentor-student communications.

We'll be presenting our own Summer of Code midterm status update to the community at OSCON 2007. We hope to see you there!

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Summer of Coders at aKademy 2007

Thiago Macieira, three time organization administrator for the KDE project, wrote in to give us an update about Summer of Code activities at the upcoming aKademy 2007 conference:



The annual KDE developers' conference, aKademy, is right around the
corner. Starting on June 30th, it is the turn of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland to welcome the KDE hackers for a week.

This year, like the previous two, Google Summer of Code students will be attending in force. At least 10 of KDE's 2007 GSoC students have already confirmed their participation and one of them will
be giving a talk: Marcus Hanwell, who is working on Kalzium, will talk about the Gentoo KDE team and packages.

During the hackathon, there is also a BoF planned to discuss KDE's participation in Summer of Code. It'll be an opportunity to share experiences, discuss the lessons learned and for our students to talk to non-participants about their experiences in the program.

The aKademy organisation has also been able to reimburse the travel fees for some of the students -- past and present, accepted or not -- who have already shown exceptional commitment. This would not have been possible without the help of this year's sponsors, including Google.

Whether aKademy will be fruitful for the Summer of Code attendees or if the developers just succeed in giving the students more work (on other parts of KDE) remains to be seen. :-)

We hope to see you there!



Thanks to Thiago for the update. We'd love to hear from Summer of Coders about their plans for the conference or their experiences when they attend. Post a comment and give us the scoop!

Monday, June 18, 2007

The OpenMRS Project

In our latest podcast episode, we got the chance to chat with Paul Biondich, mentor and organization administrator for the OpenMRS project. You'll get a chance to learn from Paul about the history of OpenMRS, life as a brand new organization in Summer of Code, and the social change uses of open source in developing nations. You can also learn ways the project could use more help from the open source community.

Many thanks to Paul for joining us.

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to the podcast. We love feedback, so post a comment and let us know what you think.

Enjoy the show!

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Spreading Open Source in Africa

While we're very excited about the global impact of Summer of Code, sadly we only have three students from all of Africa this year, two of whom are studying abroad. We asked for feedback on what we can do to build awareness of the program in Africa, and Wojciech Gryc volunteered to help by letting folks know about SoC during his upcoming trip to Kenya. We had a chance to learn more about Wojciech's work to spread open source in Africa, and we thought you'd enjoy hearing about his efforts there.

Wojciech writes:



As a Summer of Code student working for OpenOffice.org, my social interests often steer me to a fundamental human problem: can these tools be used to promote international development? Indeed, they can. Half-way through my coding, I am leaving for Nairobi, Kenya to run workshops and tutorials on OpenOffice, Inkscape, and many of the other open source projects being helped through Summer of Code.

And it's amazing how far such workshops can go. In January 2006, Emanuele Lapierre-Fortin and I traveled to Chad to run the first project of this type. We helped Rafigui, Chad's only youth-led newspaper, to turn a set of donated laptops into media centres powered by Linux other open source software. This was done through Five Minutes to Midnight, a media organization I initially started in high school. The workshops were short – only three weeks long – but were enough to allow Rafigui to adopt the software. This summer, they're now running their own set of workshops for other organizations in Chad.

This project continues our earlier work. With a $300 grant, our partner organization, Shining Hope for the Community, purchased a printer; they requested some Ubuntu CDs and used the software to start the only youth-led newspaper in Kibera, Kenya - Africa's largest slum. The youth involved are all highly motivated and interested in improving both their surrounding community and their coding skills. It seems fitting that the software that powers their work was built using a similar mindset.

Even though their are numerous technical challenges, the work is well worth it. By giving people access to computers and training materials, they gain the ability to improve their own communities in a way that fits them through a focused, grass-roots approach. Shining Hope for the Community's newsletter has already been used to spread important health messages by a local clinic. The youth involved are using the skills they've gained to work towards becoming professional journalists. Indeed, some organizations have taken the idea of open source to the next level, developing software for disaster management and reporting of human rights abuses.

So as you code and develop, design and debug, spend a moment thinking of some of the unique and interesting applications your software can have, and some of the unique social problems it could solve.



Our thanks to Wojciech for sharing his story. You can learn more about his trip to Kenya on the Article 13 Initiative site.

If anyone would like to share their story about using open source for social change or philanthropic efforts, post a comment and let us know!

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Joomla! Project

The entire Joomla! core team visited Google a few weeks ago, and I got the chance to catch up with them about all things Summer of Code. For episode four, we were joined by Jan "Wilco" Jansen, Johan Janssens, Mateusz Krzeszowiec, Louis Landry, Rob Schley, and Sam Moffatt. Joomla! is participating in SoC for the third time this year, so you'll hear tons of great advice from veteran mentors, in addition to learning more about Joomla!'s SoC 2007 projects. Both Mat and Sam joined the Joomla! project as SoC students in 2005 and went on to become core developers, and it was great to hear more from them about life in the inaugural Summer of Code.

Thanks to Johan, Mat, Louis, Rob, Sam and Wilco for joining us, and special thanks to Mat and Sam, both of whom have gone on to become mentors for Joomla! this year.

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to the podcast. We love feedback, so post a comment and let us know what you think.

Enjoy the show!

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Summer of Coders at PGCon

Rilson Oscar do Nascimento recently attended PGCon, where he gave a presentation about his Summer of Code project along with his mentor, Mark Wong. He was also kind enough to send us a report from the conference:


PGCon 2007 was held on 23-24 May 2007 at University of Ottawa, Canada, with two days of Tutorials before the main activities. We had 141 registered attendees, 13 sponsors and 28 speakers from different parts of the globe.

...

As with the PostgreSQL Anniversary Summit last year, Bruce [Momjian] launched the conference talking about history. His interesting comparison of PostgreSQL with the Apollo mission showed us that to give the "giant step for mankind" a bunch of almost unknown achievements were made. Bruce described then the 30 great leaps of PostgreSQL in the last years that kept it jumping ahead.

Still on the first day, Mark Wong, my mentor in the SoC and developer of the OSDL Database Test Suite of workloads, and I had the chance to present our Google Summer of Code 2006 project to the PostgreSQL community. I was tense since it was my first talk delivered in English (I am native of Brazil). Mark helped me a lot during the presentation. We briefly portrayed the TPC-E, the all-new TPC benchmark, and then described our workload, named DBT-5, which is an open-source fair-use implementation of the TPC-E benchmark.

...

In addition to sponsoring the Lunch of the Day, Google contributed towards my travel expenses. I'd like to thank Google for the invaluable help.

Without the help of PGCon's organizer, Dan Langille, I couldn't have attended the conference. Thank you for your support and readiness to answer my questions.



For those who are interested in learning more about the proceedings of PGCon, Rilson suggests heading over to Josh Berkus's Database Soup blog.

As usual, we love to hear from Summer of Coders about their speaking experiences. Post a comment and tell us more!

Monday, June 4, 2007

Summer of Coders at Google Developer Day

Google Developer Day was a big hit last week, and a few Summer of Coders attended and shared their thoughts with us. Hanno Schlichting wrote in to let us know that he enjoyed the sessions on Google Maps at GDD Hamburg; he was also excited to attend Jeremy Allison's presentation on Open Source at Google. Vidar Svansson told us that he was pleased to see a fellow Icelander, Gummi Hafsteinsson, presenting at GDD London. Igor Feghali has a write-up of GDD Sao Paulo for your perusal, or you can check out Ed Lee's thoughts on GDD Mountain View.

Any other SoCers attend Google Developer Day? Post a comment and let us know!

Friday, June 1, 2007

The Mono Project

For our latest podcast, we caught up with some folks from the Mono Project. Miguel de Icaza, who among his many claims to fame is founder of the Mono Project and a Summer of Code mentor and organization administrator for 2005, 2006 & 2007, was joined by three former students for Mono: Aaron Tomb, Alan McGovern and Michael Hutchinson. Check out the podcast to learn more about Mono and the project's plans for SoC this year, as well as news on other Mono Summer of Code projects from 2005 & 2006. You'll also learn more about Aaron's work on defect detection for CIL bytecode, Alan's BitTorrent libraries, and Michael's creation of an ASP.NET project type for MonoDevelop.

Thanks to Aaron, Alan, Michael and Miguel for joining us, and a special thanks to Alan and Michael, both of whom are now mentors for Mono this year!

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to the podcast. We always love to hear what you think, so post a comment and let us know your thoughts on this podcast or others you'd like to see in the future.

Enjoy the show!