Google Summer of Code Veteran Org: KDE

Next week the application period for mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2014 begins. For our 11th veteran GSoC post, the KDE team talks about a few of their students and their overall experience in the 2013 program.

Google Summer of Code 2013 saw 50 enthusiastic students coding for the summer, guided and assisted by their KDE mentors. In a span of ninety days, the students learned, innovated, created and contributed to one of the largest free and open source communities, and developed software that may affect users all over the world. As members of the KDE community, they've gained insights into the way the community functions and have had enlightening interactions with enthusiastic community members.

GSoC students and mentors have shared some quick thoughts on their experiences below:

Matěj Laitl (who worked on Amarok) joked that what he loved most about GSoC was that he got to spend his summer flipping bits instead of burgers!

"The satisfaction of working on a real life project and writing code for software which would perhaps be used by millions of people is indescribable.” -- Akshay Ratan (Plasma Media Center)

“The entire journey was truly remarkable and cannot be forgotten." -- Lukas Appelhans (Muon) 

Albert Vaca (KDE Connect) felt that he learned a lot throughout GSoC and was happy to work with such awesome mentors and believed that without their help and advice the project wouldn't have been possible.

"I first saw the GSoC poster in 2012, but at that time I didn't believe myself to be qualified enough to participate in it. But this year, my final year in college, I had made up my mind and this entire journey was a great learning experience for me!"  -- Yiou Wang (DigiKam) 

"It has been an amazing summer during which I've learned so much. I have evolved from a web newbie to a web enthusiast and had the chance to meet great people." -- Andrei Duma (Marble) 

Claudio Desideri working on Gluon as a part of GSoC said, "the possibility to learn new things, work on so many parts of a project, with so many technologies" kept him motivated!

Utku Aydin discovered something interesting during GSoC, "...that one can have a love–hate relationship with C++."

Lydia Pintscher, the main org admin and a driving force of GSoC in KDE, said, "I'm thrilled to see our community take such a large number of young bright people by the hand. Google Summer of Code and KDE have made such a profound difference in the lives of the students of previous years. I am looking forward to seeing where this year's students are going and how the projects they worked on are going to turn out."

Students worked on a vast array of KDE projects and developed new features this summer including:

• A new collaborative text editor based on KTextEditor and KDE Telepathy
• Animation support in Krita, a digital painting suite for real artists—professionals and those who create for the love and fun of it
• Communication between a user’s Android phone and their KDE desktop, with features such as desktop notification of new messages, syncing photos over WiFi, pausing music automatically during a call and more.

New KDE applications were added by GSoC students, such as:

• Artikulate – a foreign language pronunciation trainer
• Khipu - an advanced mathematical function (2D and 3D) plotter
• A web interface for KDE project reporting that provides information along with statistics and graphical reports
• A localization team management tool that handles tasks such as application booking and the review process. Localization includes translation, documentation, and internationalization. KDE is translated into more than 100 languages.

To learn more about KDE participation in Google Summer of Code, please read this comprehensive report.

Thank You
A big thank you to the people in the KDE community who have been so supportive and have encouraged students to contribute to open source as part of the community. And thank you to the mentors for the time and effort put into guiding these students and for your assistance from the beginning—proposing meaningful GSoC projects—to the completion of those projects. And many thanks to the GSoC students who worked so diligently on their projects, helping to bring new ideas and energy to free and open source software.

Google Summer of Code is many months of hard work for everyone involved. It produces surprising results and fresh enthusiasm. It helps shape minds and attitudes, provides valuable experiences and delightful, life-long memories. It fosters a new sense of freedom and opens possibilities for the participants and the people who are touched by their work. The program and its participants are the epitome of the power of free and open source software.

By Devaja Shah, KDE team

GSoC meetup at ETH Zürich

As we start the 10th year of Google Summer of Code in 2014, GSoC supporters from around the world have been hosting meetups to encourage even more students to apply for the program this March. Below, we have a student from last year’s program discussing a recent meetup he and other interested students organized in Zurich, Switzerland.

Being part of Google Summer of Code 2013 was an amazing experience. As a new masters student at ETH Zürich, I decided that it would be a good idea to spread the word about the upcoming Google Summer of Code, and motivate more students to take part in 2014.

I began by looking for past GSoC students and mentors who are located in Switzerland. It was a lengthy process, but we were able to gather up a few people into a Google group. It was exciting to find that many people were also eager to share their experiences, as well as meet fellow GSoC alumni. Veronica even offered to come over for the event from Neuchâtel, almost on the other side of Switzerland!

Thanks to Sabina and some random but fortunate chain of connections, we were able to get the interest of Wolf and Iurii of Google Zurich, who offered to speak about their experiences (and also bring over GSoC stickers and pens). It really is great to have the Engineering HQ of Google EMEA next door!

Soon, a room was booked, a flyer was designed (with over 700 given out), emails were sent out, our event was registered into the official ETH calendar, and the Google Slides were starting to take shape from the collaboration of everyone from gsoc-ch.

The day of the talk quickly came and we were anxious to see the result of our work. The projector was working fine, the second slide faded in gracefully, and all the speakers were present. Things couldn’t be better.

The session kicked off with a brief introduction to Google Summer of Code. Many students did not know much about GSoC and were interested to find out that projects ranged across many areas of study.

After the brief talk, we moved on to presenting personal projects and experiences. It was interesting to hear the varied takes on GSoC, and about what a mentor’s life is like. From stories of how the first $500 kept a student fed as well as unfortunate disappearances, the talk quickly became a very amusing and vibrant exchange between the speakers and students.

The Speakers: Seon-Wook, Wolf, Veronica, lurii, Jasper, Imran, and Sabina (left to right)

By the end of the hour and half long event, it seemed like many students had been sold on the benefits of GSoC. We gathered around to take a group photo, and dispersed knowing that we had done something good and worthwhile.

The next day brought feedback from my peers who had attended the talk. They had been won over, and were seriously considering an application to Google Summer of Code 2014. It is great to know that our efforts were not wasted!

The Google Group for GSoC alumni and prospective students in Switzerland lives on. Do stop by if you have questions, or would just like to say hello!

By Seon-Wook Park, GSoC 2013 M-Lab student

Google Code-in 2013 - drumroll please!

It’s time to announce this year’s 20 grand prize winners in the Google Code-in 2013 contest! Over the last seven weeks, 337 teenagers from 46 countries have been busy working with open source organizations to write code, fix bugs, create documentation and find creative ways to get other students interested in participating in open source, completing a total of 2,113 tasks! Congratulations to all of the students who participated in this year’s contest! You should all be very proud of yourselves.

Each of the 10 open source organizations that worked with students during the contest chose 2 students to be their organization’s grand prize winners based on the students’ comprehensive body of work.

The grand prize winners are listed below alphabetically (by first name) with their country and the organization that they worked with during Google Code-in 2013.

Akshaykumar Kalose, United States - Sahana Software Foundation
Anurag Sharma, India - Sahana Software Foundation
Benjamin Kaiser, Australia - KDE
Chirayu Desai, India - RTEMS
Dalimil Hájek, Czech Republic - Apertium
Daniel Ramirez, United States - RTEMS
Freeman Lou, United States - Haiku
Ignacio Rodríguez, Uruguay - Sugar Labs
Jacob Burroughs, United States - BRL-CAD
Jorge Alberto Gómez López, El Salvador - Sugar Labs
Mark Klein, United States - Drupal
Mateusz Maćkowski, Poland - Wikimedia
Matt Habel, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Mikhail Ivchenko, Russian Federation - KDE
Peter Amidon, United States - BRL-CAD
Puck Meerburg, Netherlands - Haiku
Samuel Kim, United States - Copyleft Games Group
Sushain Cherivirala, United States - Apertium
Theo Patt, United States - Wikimedia
Vijay Nandwani, India - Drupal

Congratulations to these 20 pre-university students who completed a remarkable 650 tasks during the contest. We asked the students to tell us a bit about their favorite tasks they worked on in the contest and here are descriptions of a few of the tasks in the students’ words:

The task was about creating a screencast of coding a Hello world module for Drupal 8. It was an ordinary task but it helped me gain recognition in the whole Drupal community. The video was also appreciated and discussed on social networks. -- Vijay Nandwani 

One of my favorite tasks was revamping the "other languages" feature on the mobile Wikipedia, for which I both added features and noticeably reduced page load times. -- Theo Patt 

My favorite task was to modify DriveSetup to make the window zoom-able. It seemed like a simple task but I was still unfamiliar with the Haiku API, so there was a bit of challenge to it. -- Freeman Lou 

I added support for new types of Flickr URLs for UploadWizard extension for MediaWiki. -- Mateusz Maćkowski

For their grand prize trip the 20 students will be flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters along with a parent or legal guardian in mid April for a four night trip. Students will talk with Google engineers, take part in an awards ceremony, enjoy time exploring San Francisco and best of all make new friends also interested in technology and open source development.

We have a special surprise in store for this year’s grand prize winners -- each year the students tell us they’d like to meet the mentors that they worked with during the contest so this year we are doing just that -- one mentor from each organization will be joining the students on the grand prize trip.

A huge thanks to all of the students, mentors, organization administrators, teachers and parents that made Google Code-in 2013 awesome!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

GSoC Meetup in Coimbatore, India

In celebration of the 10th year of Google Summer of Code in 2014, many former students, mentors, and open source enthusiasts have been hosting GSoC meetups around the globe to introduce new students to the program.  Below we have a guest post from Sarup Banskota, 2013 GSoC student with Fedora.

Some of us geeks here at Amrita University, Coimbatore, India run the tech{know}logy club and we're always trying to inspire college students to be creative and develop new ideas and implement those ideas.

We value FOSS principles throughout, and just when a tech{know}logy primer on FOSS techniques was in the pipeline, Google announced the Google Summer of Code program for 2014. We've had two past GSoC'ers, Yeswanth with the Python Software Foundation in 2011, and myself, Sarup Banskota, with the Fedora Project in 2013. Encouraged by excitement from the students, we decided to host a meetup.

The agenda was clear -- introduce students to the FOSS community and encourage them to participate in GSoC and the Gnome OPW program. With support from the CS department here at Amrita, we managed to book a hall, get loads of flyers printed, and generate interest in the classrooms.

On event day, we had about 60 students and a professor attend. There were people new to programming and there were others who had some idea about FOSS but wanted help getting started. We started off with the GSoC slide deck, stopping in between to discuss past projects and answering questions. I demonstrated GlitterGallery, the GitHub for designers I built over the summer.

To give the event an open source feel, we set up an IRC channel, mailing lists and a GitHub repo. I gave a primer on Git (which was gamified and received a lot of interest) and for part of the lesson we collaboratively built a fun project together! There were people sending in pull requests and asking questions on IRC. It was a very exciting half hour, after which we took a break and distributed some Google swag.

It was a fantastic Saturday on 9th November, and we hope a lot of the attendees will venture out to open source communities of their choice and contribute! I already had a couple of contributors come by and commit to GlitterGallery, and I hear a few others have started contributing to Gnome and Mozilla.

I'd really like to thank everyone who turned up, and my friends Aravind, Archit, Madhu, Manjush and Romil for being awesome geeks and helping out during the event. Special thanks to Kriti for the publicity and for covering the event on her blog.

By Sarup Banskota, Google Summer of Code 2013 Fedora Project student

Introducing InFact library

Have you ever heard of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule?  It says

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

This is remarkably true in practice, especially when it comes to configuring a large system at run-time. For programming languages like Java that have full reflection capabilities, one can use the language itself as a way to execute code on the fly, as is done by the BeanShell library. In C++, there is no equivalent mechanism.

Today we announce a new, lightweight library called InFact that serves as an interpreter and factory for C++ objects.  Since C++ does not have reflection, we require a tiny bit of help from the programmer, but we have kept that burden very low. InFact can interpret a set of assignment statements at run-time, then the programmer can access variables from the interpreter’s environment. The language is small and formally specified, and intentionally bears close similarity to C++ itself. The interpreter is also lightweight.

The language supports the most common primitive types (bool, int, double and string), objects that are constructed via a Factory class, as well as arrays of primitives or objects, and it can construct objects that wrap other objects.  Here’s a brief example:

// Construct a cow with a required argument, its name.

Cow c1 = Cow(name("Bessie"));

// Construct a second cow with a different name, and an optional age.

// Also, specifying a type is optional, since InFact does type

// inference.

c2 = Cow(name("Lani Moo"), age(2));

// Construct a human pet owner with the two cows as pets.

PetOwner p = HumanPetOwner(pets({c1, c2}));

InFact evolved from the Reranker Framework open source project, which uses it as its configuration mechanism.  InFact is available today from Google Code at http://infact.googlecode.com/

By Dan Bikel, Senior Research Scientist