Propeller-heads Unite!

All right you students out there … here’s your chance to get paid to work on open source software projects. Google is offering to pay you $4,500 this summer to work on an open source project, all you have to do is apply! They’ve even extended the application deadline to Monday, April 7th to make sure you have time to get your application finished.

So what are you waiting for? Apply now at: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/

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On Monday, August 20th, the 2007 Google Summer of Code came to its scheduled conclusion. The OSL mentored four students on three projects this year. We’re proud to announce that all four passed with flying colors. We’ve been delighted with the quality of their work, and look forward to continued work with them all!

Thanks to Google’s generous support, the OSL was able to host three varied and exciting projects:

• Darko Ilic - Watch & Listen, One Laptop Per Child

  Mentored by Brad Morgan and the rest of the OSL team working on the Watch & Listen project, Darko quickly and energetically joined our team building a media player and encoder for the OLPC XO laptops. He impressed us with his enthusiasm in the application process and his work throughout the summer has confirmed our initial impressions. Darko has become a valued and productive member of the Watch & Listen development team. For more information on Watch & Listen, see: http://olpc-player.helixcommunity.org

• Seth Lemons - XUL/XPCOM Kiosk

  Mentored by Eric Searcy, Seth took on the very challenging task of building a truly cross-platform kiosk-mode browser based on the Mozilla Gecko engine. Given the difficulties with stripping down a general-purpose web browser down to the bare minimum needed for a kiosk, Seth chose to build it from scratch using XUL/XPCOM on top of the Gecko engine. A daunting and complicated task, Seth nevertheless managed to get a functioning prototype up before the mid-term evaluation and has been improving it ever since. To see the code and try it our for yourself, go to: http://code.google.com/p/osl-fx-kiosk

• Rob Wohleb and Silas Snider - Drupal/Google API: Drupal modules implementing the Google Premium/Education API

  Mentored by Justin Gallardo and Greg Lund-Chaix, Seth and Rob forged into new territory blending the power of Google Apps with the Drupal content management system. With the recent release of the Google Provisioning and Single Sign-On APIs to the Google Premium and Domains for Education just before the 2007 Summer of Code began, we had a golden opportunity to add support for single sign-on and provisioning of Google hosted domain accounts to Drupal. Using Rob and Silas’ excellent work users can now have Google domain accounts automatically created when a Drupal user is added, and have them be automatically signed into their Google domain account when they log into Drupal. Some additional features in the works include Google Calendar<->Drupal event synchronization and Google mail list<->Drupal user group linkage. To see more about the modules, check out: http://code.google.com/p/drupal-google-api

This year’s Summer of Code was an unmitigated success. We are proud to say all four of our students had committed functional, good quality code before the mid-term evaluation in early July and continued to improve upon that code throughout the rest of the summer. Communication between mentors and students - a critical component - was much improved from previous years and contributed greatly to this year’s successes. Looking ahead - a bit of optimism on our part that Google will choose to renew the Summer of Code program for 2008 - we have some advice and lessons learned to share with the community:

1. Communication: The more the better. Communicate early and often. The more talking among the students and mentors and the project community, the better. Communication builds relationships and trust. It helps bring the student more deeply into the project community and has the potential to turn a summer project into a long-term relationship.
2. Code: Submit early, submit often. It’s much easier for mentors to do their jobs if students submit code as often as possible. Mentors can help bring students into the project community, but by far the most valuable service a mentor can provide is help and feedback with the student’s work - the actual code.
3. Life happens: Illnesses crop up and schedules shift. Murphy’s law strikes. Milestones change, features are added and/or dropped. It is vital that both the students and the mentors be flexible. There’s an excellent chance the project that arrives at the final evaluation is very different than the one proposed in the spring. Students and mentors need to be talking regularly and often so that expectations and deadlines change as the summer progresses - see #1.
4. Education: Last and certainly not least - learn. Even if the code produced ends up being something completely different than what was expected or incomplete, remember that the Summer of Code is as much about learning to participate in FOSS projects and communities as it is about the code itself. Of course it’s good to have student code incorporated into the projects, but it’s even more important to bring talented new contributors into the community. Even if the code written during the summer never makes it into a release, the project or community has gained a potential long-term participant that can produce more code in years to come than they could have done in the course of a single summer. If the code they submit does make it into a release, all the better, but the talented and motivated people SoC brings into our communities are invaluable.

A big “Thank you!” to everyone at the Google Open Source Programs Office and to all of the 2007 Summer of Code participants. The world is a better place because of your efforts.

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Wahoo! Summer’s come early this year!

Well, sorta. Google Summer of Code for 2007 in on! The mentoring organizations have been selected and Google is currently accepting student applications. I’m proud to say that my great employer has been selected as a mentoring organization again this year.

Google’s spending a whopping $4,000,000 bucks on the program this year! We’re talking 800 students getting paid to write open source code for some of the coolest projects in the world!

Want to get paid $4,500 to write open source code over the summer? Apply now! The student applications are due by March 24th.

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“Gimme your wallet!” or “Where’s Waldo?” … You choose. ;-)

Thank you to the fantastic folks at Google - especially LH, Chris, and Greg - for all your work. The Google Summer of Code program is a magnificent contribution to the open source community for which we are all profoundly thankful. Thank you to all the people and organizations who participated - both in the GSoC program and in the Mentor Summit last weekend. An especially big thanks to all the hard-working (and often under-appreciated) developers out there who contribute to open source projects. Without all of you and your hard work, the world would be a poorer place.

As a first-time GSoC mentor, I found the Mentor Summit to be invaluable. I knew before the summer ended that I had not done as good of a job as a mentor as I could have. But I didn’t have a good grasp on what, specifically, I personally and what we as a mentoring organization needed to do to improve. The Mentor Summit - especially the communication workshop facilitated by Robert Spier - greatly helped me solidify in my mind some concrete steps to take in preparation for next year’s GSoC. But that’s for another, much longer, post. Watch here for more once I get my notes cleaned up a bit.

Nice work everyone! Looking forward to GSoC 2007.

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Note to self: Try to not schedule a bunch of stuff on the next Friday the 13th

Let’s see, today I had:

1. A major dog and pony show for the OVSD stakeholders
2. The second day of GOSCON
3. A flight down to SFO to participate in the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

#1 of course had plenty of Murphy’s Law moments - meeting room laptop didn’t have the right software and the staff didn’t have admin access to allow us to install anything, video projector misbehavior … you know, the typical, “Hi, my name is Bubba and I be a taychnologee gooroo. Now where is that durned rodent-thing so I can show you what we done through dem Internets tubes?” kind of moments. We survived. No angry mob of teachers with torches and pitchforks chased me out of Salem, so I’ll count that as a “near miss.”

#2 …. well, stuff like that sometimes takes a while to develop. You know, say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time in the hall between sessions. That whole squishy carbon-based networking thing. I don’t think I fubared anything so I’m calling it a definite “miss” until proven wrong.

#3, however. Oh, my. Part of it I brought on myself, so I can’t blame the curse for it all (as you’ll see). But it’s damn sure … enhanced … it. Walk into the airport - flight delayed. Then Corey and I both walk up to the self-check in kiosk. He strolls right on through no problem. I, however, am told I need to see an agent. Umm … oooookaaaay … same travel agent, same flight, same everything, but I get the “special” treatment. Corey says, “I bet it’s the hyphen.” Bingo. After a lengthy and entertaining monologue involving his third wife and the phrase, “I used to be a software engineer … they dropped all those symbols to save money” from the ticket agent, we learn that yes, indeed, the system barfed because it didn’t like the hyphen in my last name. Sheesh. Off to security. Ummm … remember that Leatherman I thought I lost months ago? Found it! (yay!) In my carry-on. (boo!) Points to the PDX TSA security staff for being so friendly and patient. Individually, nothing worth thinking about. But collectively … oh yes. A palpable “hit”, Mr. Murphey.

To be fair, I did get on an airplane and, even though it was a bit late, it went up in the air, flew a few hundred miles, and came down just exactly as it was supposed to do, so I shouldn’t be complaining. Nope. No complaints here. Just a bit of chagrin and a touch of self-mockery. :-)

P.S. - After watching Wenzel play Burnout over at the Mozilla offices tonight … perhaps I shouldn’t be so sad he’s headed back to driving on German roads instead of somewhere around here. ;-)

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