Endless Summer

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 with your story, or post a comment and let us know how things are going for you.

Happy 2008 to everyone!

Updates from Joomla!

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!

Updates from Eclipse

For our latest podcast, we had a chance to get an overview of all things Summer of Code and Eclipse from Philippe Ombredanne, one of the project's organization administrators and mentors for both 2006 and 2007. Philippe shares with us a bit about the Eclipse Foundation and how the various projects under its umbrella are structured. You'll also get the opportunity to learn about how Eclipse structures its participation in Summer of Code, as well as some of the ongoing contributions of some their 2006 GSoC students. Additionally, Philippe shares some insights into effective cross-project mentoring, discussing some collaborative work done this year which was born from discussions started at last year's mentor summit.

Many thanks to Philippe for joining us!

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

If you have a cross-project mentoring success story or any other thoughts to share, post a comment and let us know.

Enjoy the show!

Summer of Coders at Campus Party

Campus Party 11, held in Valencia, Spain, was in full swing two weeks ago, and four Summer of Coders were on hand to participate in the festivities. Each of them gave a talk on their Summer of Code experience, and generally hung out to enjoy the festivities. Google tents anyone?

Laurens Vandeput, student in 2006 and mentor in 2007 for the Joomla! project, and Steffen Pingel, 2006 student for Eclipse working on Mylyn (formerly Mylar), found some cool things to discuss after their talks, and we've heard they may be collaborating on a project soon. Desmond Elliot, 2006 student for the Camino project and returning this year to work with OpenMRS, shared a bit about his love for open source as a vehicle for social change. Kai Blin, three time Summer of Code student with The Wine Project, plans to be a mentor next year, and needless to say we're looking forward to it.

You can check out more about Campus Party, including photos from the talks given by Desmond, Kai, Laurens and Steffen, on Google's Campus Party blog.

Have questions after reading the blog, taking a look at the presentation slides and checking out the pics? Want a Google tent of your very own? Well, we can't get you a tent, but we will make sure that these SoCers answer any questions you post in the comments.

[Note: Posts on Google's Campus Party blog are written in both English and Spanish.]

The Toronto Connection

For our latest podcast, we spoke with four students who are working together on their Summer of Code projects. Three of the students attend the University of Toronto, but Jeff Balogh visited the university at the start of the program to do some project planning with David Cooper, so he's an honorary UT alumni; both David and Jeff are working with mentors from the Python Software Foundation.

Along with David and Jeff, Xiaoyang Guan is also working to improve Dr. Project, focusing on creating a Mylyn plugin (formerly Mylar) for the Eclipse IDE, while David and Jeff are providing enhancements to the ticketing system. Florian Shkurti, working with the Eclipse project along with Xiaoyang, discussed a bit about his project to create a web-based code review tool. Rounding out the crew, we were joined by Greg Wilson, who in addition to work as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto is mentor for both David and Xiaoyang, and a repeat mentor for Summer of Code.

David, Florian and Xiaoyang all share space in Greg's lab at UT, and the effects of having a "live" mentor along with real-time conversation and teamwork with fellow students have proved fruitful for collaboration and mutual inspiration. In addition to hearing more about their work for Summer of Code, David, Florian, Jeff and Xiaoyang share some insights into life as a Summer of Coder working shoulder to shoulder with fellow SoCers and the changes this introduces into the typical, online-only dynamic of open source development. David and Jeff also give us more detail about the trials and successes of working together on the same SoC project.

And finally, a special bonus, a few glimpses at some cool stuff that happenned last week at OSCON 2007.

Thanks to David, Jeff, Florian, Greg and Xiaoyang for joining us!

You can download the podcast or subscribe to it. Post a comment and let us know your thoughts on the podcast or the effect of in person collaboration on open source development - we would love to hear from you!