Google Summer of Code Blog

We're Moving

2008-03-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Bailey, Open Source Team

Summer of Code is here and started! We have our new IRC channel, our website is up, and we're looking forward to signing up organizations.

But you might have noticed in the last year, we've been doing more. Quite a bit more! We've started talking more about the contributions that we've been making to Open Source. We ran the first ever Google Highly Open Participation&trade Contest. And we've started to make sure that we're telling about the various groups and people who've been helping us grow Open Source.

Summer of Code will always be special to us. It's one of the first ways that we reached out and connected, and we know that it's made a difference out there. From here on, though, we're going to talk about it on the new Google Open Source blog so you've got one place to look for all our posts. If you're looking to filter, we'll make sure that we always label the posts gsoc, so that you can get just the Summer of Code updates.

So, this isn't goodbye, but see you on the flip side....

Sounds Like Summer

2008-02-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

Google Summer of Code™ 2008 is (almost) on! Last year, we funded over 900 students' projects in more than 90 countries, producing millions of lines of code. We're very excited to be doing Google Summer of Code once more, and we're looking forward to helping the community find more new contributors and produce even more code for everyone's benefit.

We won't be accepting applications until March, so in the interim check out the FAQs for more information. You can find us hanging out in #gsoc on Freenode or on the program discussion list. We would love to hear from you, so please come and join us.

CLAM 1.2 Released

2008-02-15T09:16:00.000-08:00

Our friends with the C++ Library and Audio Music (CLAM) project have recently announced their 1.2 release, including substantial new contributions to the code base made by their Summer of Code 2007 students. Andreas Calvo Gomez created a new plugin system, enabling third party algorithms to be distributed separately from the core binaries. Other Summer of Coders created several plugins, including an SMS Synthesizer created by Greg Kellum, and one allowing CLAM to perform voice synthesis and analysis by Abe Kazemzadeh. Both Hernan Hordiales and Roman Goj also contributed code added to the project's main repository, working on SMS transformations and tonal analysis, respectively.

Congratulations to the CLAM project on their release, and many congratulations to Abe, Andreas, Greg, Hernan, and Roman for their contributions to it!

On a side note, you might want to check out the new Google Open Source Blog for news about our Highly Open Participation Contest Grand Prize winners.

It's 9:23 Pacific time / 17:23 UTC and 49° Fahrenheit / 9° Celsius here in sunny California. It's starting to feel like summer is just around the corner....

Position Filled

2008-01-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

You may recall our posts calling for help from Summer of Coders for the Highly Open Participation Contest or our call to hear more from you about your recent adventures in open source. Alexandre Vassalotti dropped us a quick note, and turns out his latest adventures include helping out with GHOP for the Python Software Foundation. He was one of their students in 2007.

Alexandre writes:

Since the end of Summer of Code, I've continued working with my mentoring organization. I am now one of the few Python core developers working on Python 3000, the next major release of the language. Like everyone else, my contributions are limited to the short amount of free time I have. Recently, I contributed to GHOP by suggesting tasks and mentoring new contributors. According to Titus, our GHOP coordinator, I hold the record for the task with the most comments. :) For me, GHOP is preparation for the next Summer of Code, but this time around I'll be mentoring.

Many thanks to Alexandre for sharing his experiences with us and many kudos to him for his mentorship of other students.

Have you been mentoring for GHOP or are you a former Summer of Code student planning to mentor during future instances of the program? We always love to hear from you; post a comment and let us know!

Summer of Code at linux.conf.au

2008-01-24T21:14:00.001-08:00

If you find yourself in Melbourne, Australia next week, Google will be hosting a student party as part of our planned festivities for linux.conf.au 2008. All Summer of Code students and mentors are welcome to attend. The party is open to any high school or university student who'd like to join us, so bring your friends! For those attending the conference, the student party is just one of the great things we've got planned for LCA; you can find full details on the Google Code Blog. It would also be wonderful to see several SoCers in the audience for my talk on Google, Open Source and Google Summer of Code so we can give all of you a round of applause.

We'll also be showcasing Summer of Code and the Highly Open Participation Contest at LCA's aptly-named Open Day, which is open to the public. Attendance is free of charge, so stop by with anyone you'd like to introduce to the the open source community.

We hope to see all of you there. If you'll be attending the conference, post a comment and let us know so we can keep an eye out for you.

Meet Your Mentors: Women in Open Source

2008-01-15T18:15:00.000-08:00

Prompted by an off-hand remark during an IRC conversation about how many women were mentoring for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, we decided it would be great to chat with several of our women mentors and find out more about how GHOP is going for their communities. During our latest podcast, you'll hear from:

Noirin Plunkett from the Apache Software Foundation
Addison Berry and Angela Byron from Drupal
Amy Stephen and Elin Waring from Joomla!

You'll likely recognize several of these names as mentors for Summer of Code. Among the many topics we covered, the phenomenal contributions of our GHOP contestants made up the better part of our conversation. You'll also hear more about best practices for encouraging women to participate in open source and some thoughts on women and community management.

Many thanks to Addison, Amy, Angela, Elin and Noirin for joining us.

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

We always love to hear from you, so if you have thoughts on the podcast or tips for helping communities be most welcoming to female contributors, post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

touchEarth

2008-01-04T16:20:00.000-08:00

You might remember Pawel from Episode Seven of the Summer of Code podcast or his tech talk on his 2007 project with WinLibre, OpenTouch. We already knew Pawel was rocking and rolling on all things open source, as he was kind enough to put together a page collating statistics from the Google Higly Open Participation Contest using the new Google Chart API. What we didn't know was that he's also the co-founder of the Natural User Interface Group, a community working on different multi-touch screen technologies. The NUI Group develops open source software like touchlib, OpenTouch and the TouchAPI. The community has more than 1000 members worldwide, all of them sharing their experiences with building their own multi-touch screens in the project's forums and IRC channel.

So what is Pawel up to when he's not tracking stats for GHOP or doing NUI community management? Hacking on touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth's features, while all the multi-touch screen events are sent to touchEarth from touchlib (or OpenTouch) using the TUIO protocol. Sound cool? Check out the demo video.

Are you performing cool feats of open sourcery? Post a comment and get in touch!

Endless Summer

2008-01-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

In our last post, we invited our students to let us know all things open source they've been working on lately, and we heard from a number of Summer of Coders who are still actively working on their projects. We'll be featuring several stories from them over the coming days.

William Candillon joined us in 2006 as a student working with the PHP project. He subsequently released phpAspect, a PHP language extension to implement Aspect Oriented programming. His efforts continued during Summer of Code 2007, where William worked on an Eclipse plugin for phpAspect.

Like all students, William has been busy with his studies, but he wrote in to let us know that he's planning a new release this month. He also let us know that he just had a paper on his Summer of Code work accepted for the upcoming EclipseCon 2008 conference, so if you're planning to attend be sure to stop by his session on Aspect PHP Development Tools.

We heard from several of our students, but we would love to hear from more of you. Send us an [email protected]">email with your story, or post a comment and let us know how things are going for you.

Happy 2008 to everyone!

Winding up and winding down for the holidays

2007-12-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

By Cat Allman and Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Open Source Team is winding down a bit for the holiday season here in the United States, and we wanted to take a chance to thank all of you once again for all of your great work in Summer of Code. We'd like everyone to be as proud of what you've achieved as we are, so we're hoping you'll take some time in the next few weeks to let us know how things have been going for you. Have you had code integrated into your project's latest release or been voted in as a committer? Have you started a great new job or given a talk about your experiences in the program? Help us celebrate your successes; email us a write up of your latest and greatest adventures - just a paragraph or two on what you've been up to - and we'll do what we can to feature it on this blog. If you're looking for inspiration, look no further than some of our past posts.

Happy Holidays to all, and see you in the New Year!

Friday, Fulbright and Rhodes

2007-12-07T13:19:00.001-08:00

Earlier this year, we heard that Sarp Centel, one of our 2007 Summer of Coders working with the OpenMRS project, would be attending Georgia Tech on a Fulbright Scholarship. This week, we got some more fantastic news: Wojciech Gryc, who you may remember from our earlier post on Spreading Open Source in Africa, wrote in to let us know that he had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. You can read more about Wojciech's accomplishments from the news site of his alma mater, the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

We want to congratulate Sarp and Wojciech on receiving these prestigious scholarships, and wish them every continued success!

And for our final bit of Friday news, those of you wondering about the latest and greatest on the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, check out yesterday's video update on the Google Code Blog.

We hope all of you are as elated by all these happenings as we are. Care to share your thoughts with us in the comments section?

Summer of Coders at FOSS4G

2007-12-04T14:00:00.000-08:00

By Cat Allman and Tiffany Griffith, Open Source Team

Google was a proud sponsor of the annual Free and Open Source Software
for Geospatial, aka FOSS4G conference, held this year in Victoria Canada in late September. We used our booth space in the exhibit hall to showcase the work of five of Summer of Code students who worked on geospatial related projects, all under the auspices of OSGeo, an umbrella organization for the Open Source Geospatial community:

Hans Haggstrom - 3D Rendering Pipeline for GeoTools
Jan Jezek - New Transformation Algorithms for GeoTools and uDig
Petr Pridal Klokan - GDAL2Tiles - Utility for easy tile-based
publishing of raster maps and KML SuperOverlay
Christophe Rousson - Caching data in uDig
Chris Whitney - JTileCache

The students also had a chance to demo their work alongside Googler James McGill in the Demo Theatre.

Two of the students have contributed blog posts on their experience with SOC and at FOSS4G - here are their stories:

Chris Whitney writes:

When I began my Summer of Code project, I was largely unaware of both the technical and the organizational aspects of open source geospatial software. At the FOSS4G 2007 Conference, I realized that both the user and developer communities supporting open source geospatial are large and diverse, including major governmental, scientific, and user-focused applications. The booths, demos, and presentations were all very interesting and informative. Meeting many of the projects' developers in person was a unique experience-- I now have faces to go along with the mailing list personalities.

I also had the opportunity to demo my Summer of Code project, JTileCache, at the Google booth, and in the demo theater. JTileCache is a Web Map Service (WMS) image tile cache written as a Java servlet. The project is available at code.google.com. My demo at FOSS4G was a user interface speed comparison between serving image tiles directly from Geoserver, versus serving the image tiles from the cache. (Obviously, the cache should make the tiles load faster.) Overall, response to the project was positive, and will encourage me to continue improving JTileCache. My mentoring organization, Geoserver, has been a great help and support throughout my Summer of Code experience. Attending FOSS4G 2007 provided strong motivation for me to continue working on JTileCache and participating in the open source geospatial community.

Jan Jezek - GSoC + FOSS4G; My story

After finishing master studies in Geodesy and Cartography at the
Czech Technical University in Prague I've started Ph.D. studies mostly because the open source software for geospatial interested me a lot. I've applied for a few student projects in my country (Czech Republic) but usually without success and also the offer of such projects for students was quite poor. So I started to be little bit frustrated because of that.

GSoC has helped me in several ways:
- I've realized that open source communities are friendly (maybe a little bit more than some lecturers :-)
- I've finally get time and motivation to learn things that I've been interested in for a long time, but still wasn't able to look deeper into them.
- It was nice to finally work on project that is having real users and to get constructive feedback from other core developers and not least;
- to be accordingly honoured for the work by Google and to have a chance to demo my work at FOSS4G.

Finally the best thing was to take a trip and see all the people from the mail lists face to face at the FOSS4G conference in Victoria. Yes, this summer was nice! Thanks Google for helping me to find my way!

Our thanks to Jan and Chris for the bloggage, their time and effort at FOSS4G, and all their hard work on their SoC projects. If you'll be giving a presentation about your Summer of Code activities or have recently attended a great conference, post a comment and let us know!

Help Wanted: Open Source for Secondary Schoolers

2007-11-28T17:07:00.000-08:00

While this news isn't strictly related to Summer of Code, we felt the community would like to hear about our newest initiative to introduce students to open source development: the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. The contest offers pre-university students the opportunity to contribute code, documentation, localization, testing and more to our ten participating open source projects. In return, our contestants have the chance to win cash prizes, a trip to the Googleplex and the all important t-shirt.

If you'd like to help us with this pilot endeavor, we would love to have you. Since many Summer of Coders were recently new to open source themselves, you are in a perfect position to provide sage advice and a helping hand to our contestants on the contest mailing list. If you're particularly passionate about one of the participating open source projects, why not suggest tasks for student participants to complete? Each project has published guidelines on how to contribute tasks for your reference.

We hope all of you are as excited about the contest as we are, and we hope to have your help in getting these new contributors up to speed. See you on the mailing list!

GenMAPP and the Cytoscape Developer Retreat

2007-11-21T12:47:00.000-08:00

The GenMAPP project enjoyed their first Summer of Code this year, and things went so well for them that they invited several of their students to the Cytoscape developer's retreat. Maital Ashkenazi joined the development team in Amsterdam for the retreat and she was kind enough to send us a report from the event. Maital writes:

The annual Cytoscape retreat and symposium was hosted by the Human Genetics Department of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam last week. Core developers, plug-in writers and Cytoscape users gathered for four days packed with tutorials, an application showcase, public symposium and development planning. This year, the GenMAPP project, along with Cytoscape, mentored four Summer of Code students. Three of us attended the conference and presented our work.

On the evening prior to the conference’s start, we went to a “meet and greet” event. It was great to finally meet two of my mentors in person. We have been working together for the past six months, and we've met in Second Life, but this is the first time we actually got to see each other in real life.

The first and last days were dedicated to software development and planning. Although I've been present in numerous software development discussions, usually during my work at high-tech firms, it was fascinating to learn how groups from around the world collaborate. The atmosphere was great; I loved watching these passionate and dedicated developers discuss priorities, envision architectures and set timelines. I especially enjoyed the decision process regarding the core redesign intended for version 3.0. We separated into two groups, each in a different room, and discussed aspects related to the new design. There were programmers with years of experience and familiarity with Cytoscape core and others less experienced, yet everyone's opinions were listened to and carefully examined. When we re-gathered we realized that one group studied this subject top-down, while the other went bottom-up. Discussions kept going and decisions were made.

The third day of the retreat was application showcase day. I had the opportunity to demo my plug-in, a search tool that enables searching biological networks on multiple attribute fields using logical operators and wildcards. It was exciting to talk in front of such big crowd. I demonstrated some aspects of the query syntax and showed how simple queries can be used in order to gain biological insight from a biological network. The first question after my demo was “Where can I download this plug-in?!?!” A big smile spread over my face, as I was just realizing that people were interested in my work. That smile kept growing as more and more people approached to congratulate me on a successful demo. Most satisfying of all, though, was to hear people suggest that I turn my plug-in into a core plug-in and have it distributed along with Cytoscape! Seeing what other plug-in developers have come up with brought up a few new ideas that I would love to incorporate into Cytoscape.

I want to thank Google for helping to sponsor my travel to the conference, but I want to thank Google even more for exposing me to the fascinating world of open source. Now that I have seen how open source development gets done I am even more excited to be a part of Cytoscape developers’ team than I was before I met them in person.

This journey would also not have been possible without the help of the conference organizers, who sponsored my accommodation. Thank you!

Many thanks to Maital for giving us a better view of the GenMAPP and Cytoscape developers' world. You know we always love to hear from Summer of Coders about the conferences they've attended - whether you're a kernel hacker or a bioinformatics geek - so post a comment and let us know what you've been up to lately.

Summer of Coders at meetBSD

2007-11-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Pawel Solyga, Summer of Coder working with the WinLibre project in 2006 and 2007, also happens to be an 'old hand' with all things BSD. He recently attended the meetBSD Conference and was kind enough to send us a report on the conference. Pawel writes:

Last weekend, I and a few of my friends from Wroclaw University of Technology attended the meetBSD Conference in Warsaw, Poland. The conference focused on different BSD-based operating systems, including FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenSolaris. The agenda included talks in both Polish and English, with most of the presentations in English given by special guests of the FreeBSD project.

We had a great time and learned a lot from all the presentations we attended, but our particular favorites included Kris Kennaway's talk on "New features and improvements in FreeBSD 7" and Slawomir Zak's presentation on "DTrace - Monitoring and tuning your system in XXI century." The organizers will be posting videos and slides from the talks over the next several days, so stay tuned to the conference site.

I also had the chance to give a tech talk detailing the results of FreeBSD and NetBSD's Summer of Code students' work since the program's inception in 2005, focusing on how these contributions have helped to shape the BSD operating systems. I also spent some time reviewing the student projects developed during 2007 in greater detail. If you'd like to check out my presentation, you can either look at a PDF of the slides or check out the interactive Quicktime presentation .

I would like to thank Murray Stokely (Google employee and FreeBSD committer) and the NetBSD Summer of Code team for all the support in both helping me research my presentation and then reviewing several iterations. Thanks also to Google for helping to defray my travel costs. See you next year at meetBSD 2008!

Wroclaw University of Technology students at the meetBSD conference

Many thanks to Pawel for the write up. If you'll be giving a presentation about your Summer of Code activities or have recently attended a great conference, post a comment and let us know!

Coolness From Creative Commons

2007-11-16T11:38:00.001-08:00

Creative Commons joined us this year for their second Summer of Code, once again with great results. 80% of their students successfully completed their projects, the same success rate as the team had in 2006. Particularly cool, one of their students created a plug-in for OpenOffice.org that allows users to select and embed Creative Commons licenses in their documents, presentations and spreadsheets.

Congratulations to Cassio, Jason, Matthias and Taylor, as well as their mentors and the wider CC community, for another fantastic round in Summer of Code!

Notes from the Mentor Summit

2007-11-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have been anticipating notes from our recent Mentor Summit, the wait is over. The summit wiki can now be viewed by anyone, though you still need to be a registered user to login and edit.

If you're interested in contributing to the wiki, please contact your organization administrator or one of the program administrators for an invitation.

If a particular topic discussed at the summit inspires you, please add your thoughts to the comments section.

Updates from the XMPP Standards Foundation

2007-10-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

The XMPP Standards Foundation, formerly known as the Jabber Software Foundation, joined us in 2007 for their third year of Summer of Code, and the results were once again superb. All six of XMPP's students successfully completed their projects, with incredibly cool results like Jingle support for Gajim. You can find more information, including links to final project summaries written by each student, in XMPP's program write up.

Congratulations to Armando, Bernardo, Brendan, Matthew, Tobias and Tomasz, as well as their mentors and the wider XMPP community, for another great showing in Summer of Code!

An Auspicious Start for Audacious

2007-10-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Audacious Media Player project joined us this year for their first Summer of Code, and all four of their students successfully completed the program. We're also pleased to hear that each student's code has been merged into the project's Mercurial tree and much of their students' code has already been further enhanced by other Audacious developers.

Congratulations to Ben, Calin, Cristian and Tomasz, as well as their mentors and the wider Audacious community, for their fantastic first foray into Summer of Code!

Gazing at Gallery

2007-10-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Gallery project joined us once again for Summer of Code 2007, and their results for this year were fantastic. All four of Gallery's students finished their projects this year, and some really exciting stuff, like support for SQLite, was added to the code base as a result of the program.

Congratulations to Adam, Brian, Camilo and UdayaKiran, as well as their mentors and the wider Gallery community, for another round of summer success!

Summer of Coders at Google: Sigurd Magnusson

2007-10-15T18:03:00.000-07:00

After hanging out with us for the 2007 Mentor Summit, Sigurd Magnusson of SilverStripe CMS was kind enough to do an interview with Dion Almaer from our Developer Programs team.

Check out Dion's post for statistics from Ohloh on the work produced by SilverStripe's students this summer. And who would want to miss the video interview of Siggy in our own personal Tiki hut?

Summer of Coders at Google: Angela Byron

2007-10-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

Following on from last week's Mentor Summit, we were fortunate enough to have two guests from the Drupal project visit us for a tech talk. Angela Byron, Summer of Coder extraordinaire, joined us along with her co-conspirator Geoff Butterfield, for a presentation on Implementing Drupal. Check out the video to learn more from Angie about the CMS' architecture and deploying Drupal sites. Added bonus, Geoff treats us to a taste of Drupal in action through a case study of edutopia.org, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where Geoff works as the foundation's Senior Technical Producer.

Many thanks to Angie and Geoff for joining us, and to Cat Allman from our Open Source Programs Office for hosting their talk!

A Moment with Moodle

2007-10-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Joining us for their second Summer of Code, the Moodle project took on nine students in 2007. Martin Dougiamas, the project's founder, sent us a great synopsis of their students' success this year:

2 created immediately useful components that were included in Moodle's new core release
4 created components slated for inclusion in their next release
1 created a component that will be maintained as a separate download
1 student created a proof of concept (voice support) that will be further developed in the future

You can get more details on each of Moodle's 2007 projects from their project wiki.

Congratulations to all of Moodle's students and mentors, as well as the wider Moodle community, for another successful Summer of Code!

CIFS, Samba and Summer of Code

2007-10-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

Last week, Google hosted the inaugural CIFS Workshop, and we were fortunate enough to rope several members of the Samba team in for a podcast. You'll get a chance to hear Jeremy Allison give an overview of the CIFS Workshop, followed by a spirited discourse with seven more members of the Samba development team: Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij, Gerald "Jerry" Carter, Kai Blin, Rafal Szczesniak, Stefan Metzmacher and Steve French. You'll get to hear about life as a Samba Summer of Code student from Jelmer and Kai, as well as some great advice on care and feeding of your student from several three-year veteran mentors. You'll also learn some tips for effective participation in the open source community overall, and a bit about the perils of working with such an intimidatingly famous group as these chaps.

And, what program podcast would be complete without stories of Winnebagos in flames and wifi-enabled poolsides in Alabama?

Many thanks to Andrew, Jelmer, Jeremy, Jerry, Kai, Rafal, Stefan and Steve for joining us, and many thanks to all of those who made the CIFS Workshop possible!

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

We always love to hear from you, so if you have any thoughts on the podcast or, even better, stories to share from the Samba team's adventures, post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

Enjoy the show!

SilverStripe's Summer of Code

2007-10-01T20:10:00.000-07:00

We just heard from the team at SilverStripe CMS that they've released version 2.1. Among the many cool features added in this release, there's a brand new security system created by Summer of Coder Markus Lanthaler.

It was SilverStripe's first year in the program, and their results were spectacular. 90% of their ten student projects were successfully completed, with all code written by Summer of Coders targeted for inclusion in their forthcoming 2.2 release. If you can't wait until around November for 2.2, you can already take a look at their students' code by checking out a daily build. You might also want to take a look at the screencast on Mateusz Ujma's work to add additional image functionality to the CMS.

Congratulations to all of SilverStripe's students and mentors, as well as the wider SilverStripe community, for their stellar initial foray into Summer of Code!

Updates from Joomla!

2007-09-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

Wilco Jansen, one of Joomla!'s organization administrators, has just published a thorough end of program report on their third year in Summer of Code. The report goes into detail about the results of Joomla!'s student projects for 2007, and provides an in-depth analysis of how the organization approached mentoring and overall structure of their Summer of Code efforts. It's a great read for those interested in joining the program as a mentoring organization, or for those organizations looking for ideas on improving their participation.

Of particular interest, this year the Joomla! team offered three of their students co-mentors from other open source projects, including fellow Summer of Code participant Eclipse. Many of our mentoring organizations have expressed interest in establishing co-mentoring relationships when participating in Summer of Code, so if you're interested in this area, check out the report; it's a great place to get some ideas about how to structure co-mentoring most effectively.

The best part of the report is the great news about the program's results for Joomla!: their participation this year yielded five new recruits for their development working group, and two of their students were mentored by Summer of Code students from 2005 and 2006.

Congratulations to Aini, Charl, Enno, Faolon, Mickael, and Muhammad, as well as their mentors and the wider Joomla! community, for their fantastic summer successes!