Strong BSD Showing at GSoC Mentor Summit

This weekend is the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. As in previous years, Google flew out a number of representatives from over a hundred open source projects to talk and brainstorm about making Summer of Code better.


The activities started last night with a hosted dinner at Amarin Thai restaurant, followed by a reception at the Tied House in downtown Mountain View (with open bar!). Kris Kennaway was visiting Google in Mountain View this past week and so was able to join us for drinks and meet some FreeBSD and Open Source developers before flying out Saturday morning. Among many others we met up with Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorne, Pawel Solyga, Todd Larsen, Randi Harper, James Youngman, Eivind Eklund, and others. Todd and Pawel are working on the next generation summer of code web application, Melange, which will be open source and built on App Engine.

Saturday I arrived late as usual to the mentor summit. I met up with Rafal Jaworowski, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle. I ran into Jeffrey Hsu representing the DragonFly BSD group, and Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine from the Tor project. Jacob worked with Bill Paul and others on the Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys work and has built a community hacker space in San Francisco. It was also great to bump into Phil Jenvey who used to work with me at Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDi a decade ago, and is now working on Jython.


In the morning I attended a session about bringing new developers into Open Source. After lunch I attended a session on the state of open source scientific computing, and I'm typing this as I prepare for the next session on Melange. Based on the discussions so far I've started writing some more process documentation for how we can run the Summer of Code program more efficiently next summer, including a Student Checklist. Apologies for the blurry photos taken in low light on an iPhone.

There are more sessions this evening and tomorrow, when Sam Leffler is expected to join us. I'll post again after the conclusion of the summit.

MeetBSD and FreeBSD Developer Summit

MeetBSD is just over one month away! If you haven't already done so, please register. I am organizing a FreeBSD Developer Summit to follow the main conference and there are still slots for developers and invited guests to take part. If you would like to present, lead a discussion, or just sit and hack with us, then please send me a mail.

Another Successful Summer of Code

I'm happy to report that we had another stellar success rate for Summer of Code students working on FreeBSD. 19 of our 21 students this summer successfully completed the program. I've collected a summary of all 19 individual projects and posted it here (freebsd.org). I also wrote a post for the Google Open Source Blog to showcase some student projects from our fourth successful summer of code. The summer has ended but many students are continuing to work on their projects. Several of these students are inevitably in the pipeline for full SVN src/ commit access, following the long line of successful FreeBSD SoC alumni before them.

Many of the mentors from different open source projects will be meeting to share ideas and best practices at the Summer of Code Mentor Summit October 25-26 at the Googleplex. Also on the calendar and relating to Summer of Code is the GSoC panel at OSBootCamp at UC Berkeley on October 30th.