Where are they now? (Summer of Code Alumni)

The Fourth Annual Google Summer of Code will begin soon and it got me wondering about the 58 students that participated in FreeBSD Projects for Summer of Code in 2005, 2006, and 2007. I sent out an email to find out what they're currently up to and was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the responses. From pursuing grad school and even post-docs to founding start-ups or working in established industry companies (Oracle, Cisco, Google) our summer of code students have pursued a variety of paths since completing their projects.

Perhaps the largest number of summer of code alumni are currently in graduate school. Ivan Voras and Fabio Checconi continue to pursue Ph.D. studies and work with FreeBSD in areas related to their original summer of code work. Ru-Gang Xu is nearing completion of his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. Matus Harvan is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Security at ETH Zurich. Zhouyi Zhou is a Ph.D student in Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences and has recently written a paper about static analysis on the MAC Framework with FreeBSD Core Team member Robert Watson. Alexey Tarasov is a Ph.D. student working part-time at the Computing Center at Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Jesper Rosenkilde is studying for an M.Sc. in mathematics and computer science and working as a department system administrator. Constantine A. Murenin is pursuing an MMath at the University of Waterloo and is a full fledged OpenBSD committer that also continues to follow FreeBSD. Nanjun LI has moved to the UK for a postdoc in the University of Edinburgh and is awaiting his upcoming Ph.D. dissertation defense. His current research focuses on wireless sensor networks and a related application called "Firegrid", and he still prefers FreeBSD as a networking platform. Maxim Zhuravlev worked on the Generic Input Device Layer for Google Summer of Code 2007, but this has since moved to a more general Enhanced NewBus project.

Emily Boyd from our 2005 summer of code has co-founded an online task management service, Remember The Milk. Roman Divacky successfully graduated after participating in both 2006 and 2007 Summer of Code and he is now employed in Unix development and still involved with FreeBSD. Christoph Mathys is working at Lucerne university. Victor Cruceru is currently a Software Engineer at Oracle's European Development Center doing UNIX porting and integration. Garrett Cooper is now working for Cisco and he credits his FreeBSD and Google Summer of Code experience in helping him land that job. Chris Jones worked on GVinum for Summer of Code 2005 and then Jail Resource Limits for Summer of Code 2006. After two successful summers, he went on to join Google's Site Reliability Engineering team in Mountain View, California.

And finally, the following 8 students (I hope I didn't forget any?) were given full commit access to the FreeBSD source code repository to facilitate their continuing development work on FreeBSD after the Summer of Code ended :
Michael Bushkov, Ulf Lilleengen, Kai Wang, Rui Paulo, Attilio Rao, Gábor Kövesdán, Paolo Pisati, and Shteryana Shopova.

Now working in San Francisco

Just an update to note that I've moved to the Google San Francisco office full-time now to work on a new team in the same general area. I will still be down in Mountain View about once a week for meetings and such, but in general I'm easier to find after work or for lunch in SF now. Incidentally, there are plenty of open job reqs both in San Francisco and down in Mountain View for those interested (to say nothing of the numerous engineering offices around the world).