Google Summer of Code 2009

XMMS2 got the good news again! It feels awesome, not only because we get to participate in this fantastic program once again, but also the prospect of going to a mentor summit later this year is awesome :-) Thanks Leslie, you know we love you! ;)

But, I heard someone whispering that our proposed projects was less interesting this year! Let's do something about that! Do you have a good idea? File it at our wiki, TODAY! :-)

GSoC 2009 and other tidbits.

I am on vacation this week, we where supposed to be in Sälen the whole week for some skiing, but due to some mandatory classes that Lisa had to attend, that didn't happen. We will leave for Sälen today instead and get 3 days in the slopes, that will be perfectly fine as well, I am actually looking forward to it a lot.

Also two days of vacation at home haven't been unwelcome at all. I have had time to reinstall my Eee 901, this time with easy peasy. I like it a lot, it really makes the most of the small screen and I didn't have to worry about drivers and X11 configuration etc, etc.

I have also submitted XMMS2 GSoC 2009 application. With some great help of theefer and wanders we finialized all the texts and got it sent away. I have a good feeling about this year, I am more motivated to be the admin and we have learned a lot. I just hope that Google gives us the chance this year as well.

On a XMMS2 releated note DrM has finaly entered testing period. This is waay overdue and we hope that we can wrap it up before the start of the GSoC, so that students can work against that version and not some unreleased one.

XMMS2: State of the Union

I haven't really posted here as much as I should. I just wanted to quickly update the current status of XMMS2.

XMMS2 DrJekyll pre-testing:
DrJekyll is the next developer-release. We should start pre-testing this week. Jekyll contains tons of cool goodies. Most notable is the additions of Collections. You should all look into porting your clients to this concept since we are going to deprecate the API for touching SQL directly.

Google: Summer of Code:
We have decided to apply for summer of code once more. Hopefully we will be picked and we can accept a few student this year also. You can visit our project ideas page and give some insights on what you want to see in XMMS2.

Graphic contest:
We have a strong need for a graphic profile in XMMS2 so we are going to spend some SOC money from last year on announcing a contest that will bring us (hopefully) a logotype and a nice wiki design. This project will probably be launched within a few weeks. Look at this spot later on.

More from Mountain View #1 - Summer of Social Integration?

One thing that really struck me when I was at the mentor summit in Mountain View was that Summer of Code is really more about social integration and contact making than I ever imagined. When I carried out the project within XMMS2 I saw it as a way to get cool features incorporated into XMMS2 and some kick-ass code. After spending some time with other mentors (and former students) I realized how this is only half the truth.

GSoC is really about bringing bright people and coders that have not been exposed to open source into our communities, this is where the long time benefit is getting realized. If we get some new non-FLOSS coders into our little group and can keep them there we have the real benefit of the program.

For my part I will surely look at the students in a very different perspective next year.

I would like to say that GSoC is 70% about social integration and 30% of code. Maybe it's time to rename it to Summer of Social Integration?

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, Mountain View, CA

For the last week I have been in California for some work and now for the Summer of Code Mentor Summit. If you don't know what Google Summer of Code is you should probably look here. Google wanted a follow-up on their program and invited two people from each successful organization to Mountain View, CA to discuss between mentors how we can improve this to next year.

It has been a wonderful day at Googleplex with lot of sessions, meetings and cold soda. We really got to discuss all the problems that we encountered during the program and made some real progress on how we want to work it out next year. It's funny how much energy it gives you to discuss open source things with open source developers. I am really looking forward to mentor students next summer and I really think I can be a better mentor by really treating the students as students and not "yet-another-opensource-developer".

Apart from discussing the SoC program I found some really nice guys that I got the chance to talk code with. Me and Seb Ruiz (from Amarok fame) had a very productive talk on how we could help each other and share code / standards between XMMS2 and Amarok. Great things might come from this. And I had a lot of time to spend with Ralph Giles from Xiph talking about everything from an XMMS2 ogg-demuxer and the future of vorbis.

All in all I had a wonderful time and I am really happy that I had the chance to be here with all of you.

p.s. Chris DiBona uses XMMS2, cool :-) d.s.