The Toronto Connection

For our latest podcast, we spoke with four students who are working together on their Summer of Code projects. Three of the students attend the University of Toronto, but Jeff Balogh visited the university at the start of the program to do some project planning with David Cooper, so he's an honorary UT alumni; both David and Jeff are working with mentors from the Python Software Foundation.

Along with David and Jeff, Xiaoyang Guan is also working to improve Dr. Project, focusing on creating a Mylyn plugin (formerly Mylar) for the Eclipse IDE, while David and Jeff are providing enhancements to the ticketing system. Florian Shkurti, working with the Eclipse project along with Xiaoyang, discussed a bit about his project to create a web-based code review tool. Rounding out the crew, we were joined by Greg Wilson, who in addition to work as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto is mentor for both David and Xiaoyang, and a repeat mentor for Summer of Code.

David, Florian and Xiaoyang all share space in Greg's lab at UT, and the effects of having a "live" mentor along with real-time conversation and teamwork with fellow students have proved fruitful for collaboration and mutual inspiration. In addition to hearing more about their work for Summer of Code, David, Florian, Jeff and Xiaoyang share some insights into life as a Summer of Coder working shoulder to shoulder with fellow SoCers and the changes this introduces into the typical, online-only dynamic of open source development. David and Jeff also give us more detail about the trials and successes of working together on the same SoC project.

And finally, a special bonus, a few glimpses at some cool stuff that happenned last week at OSCON 2007.

Thanks to David, Jeff, Florian, Greg and Xiaoyang for joining us!

You can download the podcast or subscribe to it. Post a comment and let us know your thoughts on the podcast or the effect of in person collaboration on open source development - we would love to hear from you!