Google Open Source Blog

A Correction to Google Summer of Code 2012 Stats - Part 2

2012-05-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

When we published the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012, we received an email pointing out that we were missing one school that belongs in the Top 10. PESIT - Peoples Education Society is now shown below in the corrected chart.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10 10	PESIT - Peoples Education Society UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	India Brazil	8 8	3 14

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code coding starts today

2012-05-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

Today is the first day of coding for our 8th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year 1,208 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 180 different open source organizations. Students are working on a diverse group of projects ranging from developing game systems to Spotify integration for existing tools to modules for group theory.

We are excited to see the contributions this year’s students will make to the open source community.

For more information on important dates for the program please visit our timeline.

Have a great summer!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code 2012 Stats - Part 2

2012-05-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

And now the news that some of you have been waiting for: the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10	UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	Brazil	8	14

As you can see, some schools have a big jump in participants over 2011 - yes, I’m talking about you, BITS-Pilani - while a few schools show a drop off in students. To compare, let’s look at the overall “Top 10” schools for the past 8 years.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students: 2005-2012
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	164
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	75
3	National University of Singapore	Singapore	58
3	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	58
3	Universidade Estadual de Campinas - UNICAMP	Brazil	58
4	University of Toronto	Canada	57
5	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	51
6	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	49
7	Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	48
8	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	42
8	Politechnika Wroclawska	Poland	42
9	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	United States	41
10	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	38

Charts like these highlight how international Google Summer of Code truly is.

It’s important to remember that the number of students from each school is not the point of the program. Over 13% of accepted students are from schools whose students are participating for the first time this year. What matters is participation - getting more students involved with creating free and open source software.

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Macedonia Google Summer of Code meetups are a success

2012-05-16T15:00:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to everyone who was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012! I hope we have a great summer, and write some free, clean, reusable code.

Free Software Macedonia is a local organization from Macedonia that again helped spread the word about this year’s Google Summer of Code. Last year I was introduced to free software and eventually participated in the program after reading a blog post by one of the Free Software Macedonia members. The right information and the right timing can do wonders, especially for students that are enthusiastic about doing new things and getting some practical coding experience. Three students from Macedonia participated in last year’s Google Summer of Code, including me. This number and all the others I will present may seem small to you, but Macedonia is a very small country with approximately 2,000,000 citizens.

This year we wrote blog posts, organized a lecture at the biggest technical university in the country and filled the amphitheater, and held follow up sessions to introduce possible future participants in Google Summer of Code with the tools that are used by free software communities and share some knowledge with them. We also provided support for anyone who needed it along the way as well as a space for the students to work.

At the lecture at the university, the three students that participated last year all shared their experiences as well as tips and tricks for picking an organization and writing proposals. One of the senior members of Free Software Macedonia explained the concept of free software to those audience members who were unfamiliar with the term.

We have a hackerspace in Skopje, Macedonia called KIKA that we fund and manage ourselves, and it plays a big role in promoting these kind of programs. We had 20 students attend the follow up session where we showed the prospective students the basic tools needed to be successful in free software development such as mailing lists, bug tracking software, coding concepts, git etc. We installed Linux on the many machines and discussed projects with the students. KIKA is also a public space so it was open for students to come and work there during the application period and throughout the summer. The older and more experienced members are always a great support and can help the struggling coder to see the code from a different angle and eventually achieve success.

In the end, ten people from our sessions ended up applying for Google Summer of Code, and six, all of whom worked together to achieve this at KIKA, got in. You can see their smiling faces at the moment the emails arrived on the image (I am missing from the photo).

So, from just three people last year, we doubled that number this year and we hope to double our student participation again next year. We will continue spreading the word about the program, giving support to interested students and a place for the students to work. Many thanks to Google for giving us this great chance, and helping free software. I wish you a successful summer!

Editor’s note: There was an additional student from Macedonia who was also accepted into the program making the total number of Macedonian Google Summer of Code students for 2012 seven.

By Tamara Atanasoska, 2011 and 2012 Google Summer of Code student

Googlers at Large

2012-05-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

With May comes the annual ramp up of conference season, and Googlers who are part of the open source community will be giving talks and participating in events around the world over the next two months.

Last week, Jeremy Allison attended Samba XP, the 11th international Samba conference for users and developers in Göttingen, Germany speaking on "The Evolution of IO in Samba".

Our Chicago Google office will host past and present Google Summer of Code students and mentors along with students from DePaul, IIT, Northwestern, UChicago, and UIC Universities on May 23rd (Wednesday) for an evening of lightning talks delivered by accepted Google Summer of Code students and Google engineers. You can find all the details here, including how to register (pre-registration is required).

Chris DiBona will be speaking to the Open Cyber Security Roundtable in Menlo Park on May 30. The roundtable is part of a larger program to get more open source tools and apps into the security arsenal of federal, state and local government.

On June 12th, Cat Allman will be facilitating a session at the inaugural USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Summit. WiAC will take place as part of USENIX Federated Conferences Week (FCW) in Boston, MA.

Attendees and viewers of Google I/O coming June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco will hear about a variety of Google’s open source projects, stay tuned to https://developers.google.com/events/io/ for more information on sessions. There will also be a dinner for GSoC Mentors hosted by Carol Smith in late June.

We hope to see you at one of these spring events!

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code 2012 by the Numbers: Part 1.1

2012-05-10T08:00:00.002-07:00

So many of you have asked about the number of students from your particular country that we’ve decided to simply post the whole list.

Number of Accepted Students by Country

India = 227

United States = 173

Germany = 72

Russian Federation = 56

China = 45

Poland = 42

Sri Lanka = 42

Romania = 40

France = 38

Canada = 36

Brazil = 33

United Kingdom = 31

Italy = 30

Austria = 25

Ukraine = 25

Spain = 23

Singapore = 20

Greece = 18

Czech Republic = 15

Turkey = 15

Hungary = 14

Sweden = 14

Slovenia = 11

Belgium = 9

Croatia = 8

Finland = 8

Australia = 7

Belarus = 7

Ireland = 7

Macedonia = 7

Netherlands = 7

Switzerland = 7

Vietnam = 7

Slovak Republic = 6

Bulgaria = 5

Japan = 5

Serbia = 5

Argentina = 4

Egypt = 4

Latvia = 4

Lithuania = 4

Pakistan = 4

Portugal = 4

Bangladesh = 3

Chile = 3

Ecuador = 3

Israel = 3

Moldova = 3

Norway = 3

Peru = 3

South Korea = 3

Colombia = 2

Estonia = 2

Indonesia = 2

Taiwan = 2

Algeria = 1

Bosnia-Herzegovina = 1

Denmark = 1

Hong Kong = 1

Mauritius = 1

Mexico = 1

Nepal = 1

New Zealand = 1

Saudi Arabia = 1

South Africa = 1

Uruguay = 1

Uzbekistan = 1

Venezuela = 1

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code 2012 by the Numbers: Part 1 of 2

2012-05-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Now that the mentoring organizations have made their selections, it’s time for the first of two posts breaking down the numbers about the students accepted into the 2012 instance of Google Summer of Code.

This 8th year of Google Summer of Code is the largest yet. More mentoring organizations received more applications from more students than ever before. We received a record number of applications - 6685 - from 4258 students from 98 countries to work with the 180 selected mentoring organizations.

We also accepted more students this year: 1212 from 69 countries. This year India supplied the largest number of students, 227.

The 10 countries with the highest number of accepted students are:

Country	# of 2012 Accepted Students
India	227
United States	172
Germany	72
Russian Federation	56
China	45
Poland	42
Sri Lanka	42
Romania	40
France	38
Canada	36

This year we are excited to have a student from the African nation of Mauritius, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius) which hasn’t previously been represented in Google Summer of Code.

The program set another record this year: the highest percentage yet of women accepted. 8.3% of our accepted students identified themselves as female, versus 7.1% percent last year. Overall the percentage of women accepted has slowly but surely increased every year since 2006.

We’re very excited to see what our record crop of students come up with this year! Currently the students are in the community bonding period where they familiarize themselves with their projects, mentors and communities, before the coding period starts on Monday, May 21st. Good luck to them all!

Please visit our program site and timeline for more information, and watch this space for part 2 of “Google Summer of Code 2012 by the Numbers” about the universities represented this year.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Introducing Ceres Solver - A Nonlinear Least Squares Solver

2012-05-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Solving non-linear least squares problems comes up in a broad range of areas across science and engineering - from fitting complicated curves in statistics, to constructing 3D models from photographs in computer vision. Today we're happy to announce the release of a solver we use at Google.

Ceres Solver is a portable C++ library that allows for modeling and solving large complex nonlinear least squares problems. The notable features are:
• A simple, expressive API
• Automatic differentiation
• Robust loss functions
• Local parameterizations
• A threaded Jacobian evaluators and linear solvers
• Dense QR factorization (using Eigen) for small problems
• Sparse Cholesky factorization (using SuiteSparse) for large sparse problems
• Specialized solvers for problems in 3D computer vision
• A liberal license (New BSD)
• Scales from servers to cell phones.

We use Ceres Solver at Google to estimate the pose of Street View cars, aircrafts, and satellites; to build 3D models for PhotoTours; to estimate satellite image sensor characteristics, and more. For example, the video below shows three instances of Ceres Solver fusing data from the sensors mounted on a Street View car to estimate its correct position and orientation on the surface of earth.

We hope you will download the code, solve some problems, and share your experiences on the mailing list.

By Sameer Agarwal & Keir Mierle, Geo Software Engineers

Worldwide Mirrors of git.kernel.org

2012-04-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

The Git version control system plays a big part in the development of the Linux kernel and its related utilities. Developers around the world need fast access to the repositories hosted by git.kernel.org.

Today Google is making available a public mirror of git.kernel.org at https://kernel.googlesource.com/. This mirror service is backed by the same high speed infrastructure that hosts the Android Open Source Project, which already serves more than 1 terabyte of data and 2.5 million requests each day.

kernel.googlesource.com is served out of multiple Google data centers, utilizing facilities in Asia, the United States and Europe to provide speedy access from almost anywhere in the world.

By Shawn Pearce, Open Source Programs Office

Students Announced for Google Summer of Code 2012

2012-04-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

We have announced the 1,212 students that will be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. Students will now start the community bonding period where they will get to know their mentors and prepare for the program by reading documentation, hanging out in the IRC channel (#gsoc) and familiarizing themselves with their new community before beginning their actual coding at the end of May.

If you are interested in learning more about the 180 organizations that the students will be working with during the 2012 Google Summer of Code or important dates, please visit the program website.

Congratulations to our accepted students! We look forward to an exciting and productive summer of coding.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Office

Record number of student applications for Google Summer of Code

2012-04-06T15:31:00.001-07:00

Earlier today the application deadline for students wishing to participate in Google Summer of Code 2012 came to a close. Thank you to all the students who applied to be a part of this year’s program. We had a record 6,685 student proposals from 4,258 students submitted to this year’s 180 participating mentoring organizations.

The mentoring organizations will now take the next couple of weeks to read through all of their student proposals and decide which students their organization will mentor this summer.

Students: stay tuned to the Google Summer of Code site where we will announce all of this year’s accepted Google Summer of Code students on April 23 at 19:00 UTC. For additional important information about the program check out our timeline and read our Frequently Asked Questions.

You can always stay up to date on all things Google Summer of Code on this blog, our mailing lists or on our IRC channel #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck, students! May the odds be ever in your favor.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Final Hours to Submit Student Proposals for Google Summer of Code

2012-04-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

Students, the deadline for submitting your proposal for Google Summer of Code is only hours away. Be sure to submit your proposal to the program site by this Friday, April 6th at 19:00 UTC (Noon PST) to be considered for this year’s program.

For tips on writing a quality proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations check out the student manual. This is a highly competitive program and the quality of your proposal is what will set you apart from the rest of the applicants.

For more tips, see a list of some helpful dos and don’ts for successful student participation written by a group of experienced Google Summer of Code administrators, our user’s guide for the program site, Frequently Asked Questions and timeline. You can also stay up-to-date on all things Google Summer of Code on our Google Open Source blog, mailing lists or on IRC at #gsoc on Freenode.

Don’t miss out on an exciting summer full of open source coding by waiting until the last minute and missing the deadline. All proposals must be submitted before Friday, April 6th at 19:00 UTC.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

Moratuwa, Sri Lanka Google Summer of Code meetup

2012-04-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

We held our fifth Google Summer of Code meetup in the Moratuwa, Sri Lanka area on March 17th. We had enormous support from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering staff at the University of Moratuwa to make it a full scale session covering many of the aspects of the program that are important to students. We had almost 150 students (a record high) in the morning introductory sessions and around 40 students during the afternoon sessions that were geared more toward second and third year university students.

Kathiravelu Pradeeban delivered an excellent 80 minute Google Summer of Code information presentation focusing on general open source fundamentals from how to communicate within open source communities to proper email/IRC etiquette to open source culture. He also discussed general information about Google Summer of Code such as important dates for the program, how to apply, guidelines on how to write project proposals, and some ideas to think about when deciding if a project is a good fit for you. In later sessions there was more of a focus on open source technologies with demos on how to effectively use these technologies for open source development work.

The students were very excited about the program, and asked many questions both publicly and to us individually after the session ended. We tried to clear up doubts students had about their own ability levels and encouraged them to participate by showing some of the great opportunities of working on a real-life project rather than the fake projects that they do at university most of the time. We also explained about the value of having connections all around the world and the spiritual happiness open source projects bring in general. Those of us that had participated as students with Google Summer of Code shared our experiences including one participant whose Google Summer of Code project caught the eye of a well known IT company who hired him.

Good luck to those students currently applying for Google Summer of Code!

By Kasun Gajasinghe, former Google Summer of Code student for DocBook Project and Gentoo Linux, 2012 DocBook Project mentor

Localize your apps and content more easily -- new formats in Translator Toolkit

2012-03-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

At Google, we put a lot of energy into helping localize the world’s information to make it more useful to more people. It’s not just about localizing our own products -- we want to provide tools that make it easy for translators and developers around the world to localize their own apps and content. Google Translator Toolkit is our online translation tool for amateur and professional translators -- it’s built on Google Translate and supports more than 100,000 language pairs.

This week, the Translator Toolkit team has launched support for four new translation-related file formats:
• Android Resource (.xml)
• Application Resource Bundle (.arb)
• Chrome Extension (.json)
• GNU gettext-based (.po)

With these new file formats, you can use Translator Toolkit to localize your apps and other products and content much more quickly and easily.

For example, to translate your Android application, go into the res/values directory and upload strings.xml into Translator Toolkit -- Translator Toolkit will now automatically translate it. You can then share your translations with amateur or professional translators, who can localize the text using Translator Toolkit’s WYSIWYG online editor.

When you’re finished, you can export your translated application and store it in a locale-specific directory in Android. Voilà -- easy localization! 翻译起来太方便了!

In addition, we’ve made the Translator Toolkit interface more intuitive for these new file formats so users can translate faster and more accurately. For example, you can turn on ‘Customized colors’ so translators can annotate the edited segments, ‘Number of characters in the segment’ to make sure the text doesn’t run too long (very important for mobile devices), and ‘Synchronized scrolling’ so you can scroll the original and translated text at the same time, which makes navigation much easier.

With these new file formats and UI features, along with the file formats we already support (.aea, .srt, .html), we hope Translator Toolkit can help you reach more users around the world.

When you’re ready, give Google Translator Toolkit a try and suggest any improvements you’d like to see so we can work on making it even better.

Posted by Chris Yang, Product Manager and Haidong Shao, Software Engineer, Translator Toolkit

The Go project reaches a major milestone: Go 1

2012-03-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

In November 2009 Google announced the Go project, a new open source programming language. Since then more than 200 outside contributors have made thousands of contributions to the code, tests, and documentation. The open source community has been essential to Go's success.

It is a great pleasure to announce today that the Go project has reached a stable point we are calling Go version 1, or Go 1 for short. Go 1 is the result of months of work refining the specification, improving the implementation, enhancing portability and re-working and adjusting the standards library. Go 1 offers compatibility for future growth: programs written to the Go 1 specification will work dependably for years to come even as Go continues to develop.

The benefits of Go 1 are also available to Google App Engine developers, as Go 1 is now the standard Go runtime on Google App Engine.

Go 1 is a consistent, portable, dependable base upon which to build programs, projects, and businesses. To learn more about Go 1, hear what the gophers have to say at the Go blog. For more information about Go in general, visit golang.org, which has documentation, references, articles, and even an interactive tour of the language.

By Andrew Gerrand, Go Team

EclipseCon ‘12 is Loaded with Googlers

2012-03-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

EclipseCon 2012 begins today in Reston, Virginia with a veritable herd of Googlers on hand to teach, talk and generally hang out with the Eclipse community.

The information starts flowing at 9am on Tuesday when Googler Alex Russell delivers the opening keynote on “The Web Platform Is the Past, Present, and Future.”

But wait, there’s more:

Tuesday 3/27
Dan Rubel is speaking about Dart, a new open source programming language.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/dart-action

Alex Ruiz will talk about Xtext 2.x and lessons learned while developing custom editors at Google.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/xtext-success-story-google

Wednesday 3/28
Eric Clayberg will be talking about Building GUIs with WindowBuilder.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/building-guis-windowbuilder

Shawn Pearce is speaking on Gerrit and peer code reviews.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/harnessing-peer-code-reviews

Thursday 3/29
Last but not least, Sergey Prigogin is holding a session for beginners on C++ Refactoring.
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/c-refactoring-now-real

Hope to see you there!

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

A new kind of summer job: open source coding with Google Summer of Code

2012-03-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's only Spring Break for most college students, but summer vacation will be here before you know it. Instead of getting stuck babysitting your little sister or mowing your neighbor's lawn, apply for Google Summer of Code and spend the summer of 2012 earning money writing code for open source projects.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that gives university students a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for future employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

For the past ten days, interested students have had the opportunity to review the ideas pages for this year’s 180 accepted projects and research which projects they would like to contribute to this year. We hope all interested students will apply! Submit your proposal to the mentoring organizations via the Google Summer of Code program website from today through Friday, April 6 at 19:00 UTC.

Google Summer of Code is a highly competitive program with a limited number of spots. Students should consult the Google Summer of Code student manual for suggestions on how to write a quality proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations. Multiple proposals are allowed but we highly recommend focusing on quality over quantity. The mentoring organizations have many proposals to review, so it is important to follow each organization’s specific guidelines or templates and we advise you to submit your proposal early so you can receive timely feedback.

For more tips, see a list of some helpful dos and don’ts for successful student participation written by a group of experienced Google Summer of Code administrators, our user’s guide for the program site, Frequently Asked Questions and timeline. You can also stay up-to-date on all things Google Summer of Code on our Google Open Source blog, mailing lists or on internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until April 6!

To learn more about Google Summer of Code, tune in to the Google Students page on Google+ next Monday, April 2nd at 3:30 pm PDT for a Hangout on Air with Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona. He'll be talking about Google Summer of Code with other members from the Open Source team at Google. Submit your questions about the program between now and next Monday using the hashtag #gsochangout, and Chris and the Open Source team will answer them live during the Hangout On Air.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Google Summer of Code 2012 Meetup held in Rome

2012-03-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

On March 15th about 30 students participated in the Google Summer of Code info session held at Fusolab in Rome, Italy by Ninux.org. Some of the students were well known in the local community and have been participating in the development of open source software, while others were excited to start working on open source. There's always a first time to work on open source software development and we think Google Summer of Code is the best occasion to do it! A few of the students were slightly concerned about the overlap between the program and their exams in July but the mentors explained that with careful and realistic planning delivering a successful project is definitely achievable.

Photo taken by Federico Capoano

Ninux.org is an Italian wireless community whose primary goal is to build a community of skilled people that participate in building open and decentralized wireless networks in the Italian peninsula for experimental purposes. For us the Google Summer of Code has been a great way to attract new promising and talented minds in our community. Many of the students that participated in previous years are still contributing, hacking and experimenting with new technologies with us.

We hope to contribute in forming the new generation that will push forward the open source philosophy applied to real life in our country. We believe the open source philosophy is the best approach in solving many of the issues in our society, so we put effort in applying it not only to software, but also to all our other activities. Collaborate, teach, learn and share. The Future is Now!

By Saverio Proto Google Summer of Code mentor for Ninux.org

SIGCSE 2012 Was Inspiring!

2012-03-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month I was honored to attend the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina with 1,300 other attendees. The conference attracts a dynamic and diverse group of students, educators, academics, and industry professionals who are all working toward stronger computer science education. This year’s theme “Teaching, Learning, and Collaborating” drove the discussions to topics such as classroom presentation technologies, on-line collaboration tools, new educational techniques, as well as acquiring hands-on experience with new hardware and software (including software development environments).

On Thursday evening I hosted a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in where we talked about both programs in depth and gave everyone in attendance more information in the form of flyers as well as directing them to our website. I encouraged everyone to either apply to be a student in Google Summer of Code or spread the word to students they knew that might be interested in open source software development. People streamed in and out during our session so we were able to get the word out to quite a few people at the conference.

Below is a picture of a few of our attendees at the end of the session.

All the people I met or spoke to were inspiring: they all were very interested in participating and spreading the word about our programs and about technology and computer science. We may have encouraged some of the students to apply to the programs, especially the Google Summer of Code which starts in a couple of weeks!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Drupal Usability Test Conclusions: A Missing Conceptual Foundation

2012-03-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year we announced that we would be conducting a Drupal usability study that we would live stream so viewers could watch as participants worked with Drupal 7. Becky Gessler and I are excited to announce our analysis of the results that we will also present at DrupalCon Denver to the Drupal community in a “core conversation” session with Jen Lampton called “User eXperience for Open Source: How to Galvanize a Community."

After the study concluded we posted a YouTube playlist with each participant’s session. We went through each video and wrote down problems that each participant faced along with direct quotes, then consolidated and grouped these together by issue area. This document was posted on Drupal.org and members of the Drupal community have been filing issue reports to work on fixing specific problems.

While we learned about a lot of specific interface-level problems, we also saw broad trends that called for a higher-level analysis. We witnessed new users feeling confused, overwhelmed, uncertain and unaware of Drupal’s capabilities. Becky and I set to work preparing a summary of our findings. Out of the data, four layers of usability issues emerged:

Conceptual: Most problems that new users encounter boil down to a missing understanding of how Drupal works, particularly the interaction between content, content types, and fields.
Flow: While trying to complete tasks, new users frequently felt lost inside Drupal because they couldn’t tell what they were looking at, how they got there, or where they were supposed to go next.
Terminology: Drupal is filled with terminology that just doesn’t make sense to new users.
Interface: New users don’t trust Drupal because many interfaces are not intuitive.

We are excited for discussion in the Drupal community about how to best tackle the problems outlined in these layers. You can find our complete analysis in this report.

New users from our study did have some positive impressions of Drupal as well. Once they understood how it works, they were impressed by the power and extensibility that Drupal offers. This study also demonstrated that Drupal 7 brought significant usability improvements over Drupal 6, particularly with the ease of user interaction with administrative tools and the Views creation wizard.

We are excited by the success of this study. We look forward to engaging the Drupal community in discussion at DrupalCon Denver during our core conversation, and we are confident that by working together as a community, we can shape Drupal to be more supportive and helpful for new users.

By Garen Checkley, Google Search Quality Team

Test your Web Apps on Chrome with ChromeDriver

2012-03-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

ChromeDriver is a tool for testing websites with Google Chrome that implements the open source WebDriver wire protocol so it can easily be integrated with an existing WebDriver test suite. For those who aren't familiar with WebDriver, you may want to refer to our initial post about the project. Simply put, WebDriver presents an object-based API for automating the web from a real users perspective, such as clicking elements on a page and typing into text fields.

The WebDriver API is available for many popular browsers. Each browser has its own driver, with ChromeDriver, of course, supporting the WebDriver API for Google Chrome. Unlike other drivers which are maintained by the open source Selenium/WebDriver team, ChromeDriver is developed by Chromium, the open source project that Google Chrome is based on.

Besides a new ChromeDriver release this past week, we wanted to share info about a new website dedicated to the project: http://code.google.com/p/chromedriver. This site will serve as the central location for all things relating to ChromeDriver. You can use the new site to:

ChromeDriver works with the current stable, beta, and dev versions of Google Chrome. Older versions of Google Chrome are not supported and are not guaranteed to be compatible with ChromeDriver. Consult the release wiki for more information on our release and support policy.

Thanks for testing with Google Chrome!

By Ken Kania, Chromium Developer

FreedroidRPG Google Summer of Code Students Stand Up to the Bots

2012-03-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

FreedroidRPG is an open-source role playing game that has been around for a few years, written by a dedicated small team. The project participated in the Google Summer of Code program in both 2010 and 2011 with a total of 7 students over the two years, and we set out to offer the best possible learning experience for our students. Our goals were twofold: we wanted to acquire new, regular contributors, and we wanted to share our passion for writing a free software game. Our participation in Google Summer of Code was quite a success and taught us a lot about how to make newcomers feel welcome and encourage them to speak their mind and contribute.

Mentoring students requires a lot of time and patience, so your project participants have to be ready to invest a significant amount of time. As with all investments, it may or may not turn out to be “profitable” - many people are attracted to game development but after they’ve taken part they realize that it’s not as easy as they thought. As a result, it is to be expected that not every student will be a good match for your project - not all students will stay after the program ends. Our advice to mentors is to define precisely what the goals of the project’s participation in Google Summer of Code are. Only when you know what you want can you accurately drive your project in the right direction.

This year, we made the decision not to apply to Google Summer of Code for a couple of reasons. The first is that we feel that other organizations deserve their turn and after two summers and a presentation at FOSDEM’12, FreedroidRPG appears to be quite a relevant open source game, and others should be given a chance to acquire the kind of success that we’ve had. The second is that the mentors have spent the last two years investing their time mentoring students and did not have much chance to actually write any computer code. We like free software a lot which is why we don’t wish to stop writing code and spend all of our time mentoring students. So in 2012 we will be taking care of our own passion for code, hopefully coming back in future years to Google Summer of Code with exciting new project ideas and top-level mentors!

We believe that video games are a great way to discover the world of computer programming because it is appealing to so many of us. At FOSDEM’12, I made a presentation in the games developer room aimed at showing a few of the technical problems that we face every day when writing FreedroidRPG. Hopefully the video can help the readers understand why I love writing games so much.

By Arthur Huillet, FreedroidRPG lead developer and Google Summer of Code mentor/org admin

Below is the testimony from Alexander Solovets, one of our students from Google Summer of Code 2010. He worked on a project called “random dungeon generation”, and I’ll let him explain what it was and how he feels about Google Summer of Code.

I heard about Google Summer of Code for the first time two years ago. I was finishing my senior year at university and was looking for a summer occupation. After reading the announcement of Google Summer of Code I thought it would be great: there was no need to relocate, I could work on open-source projects and solve real problems all in the same role. I started reading articles describing the experience that students had in previous years. There was a lot to read, but the most helpful advice I learned was that the odds of being selected and successfully completing your project is much higher if you are really interested in the project and organization as a whole. That is how I met Freedroid.

This organization had an ideal combination of algorithms and game development, two things I like a lot. I took a brief look at other organizations and when the time came I applied to FreedroidRPG. Several months earlier a classmate of mine had shown me the NetHack game, which carried me away for a long period (and I still play it from time to time today). The most exciting feature in NetHack was the randomness of all kinds: you would never know what to expect after the next door. I was amazed to see that FreedroidRPG proposed a project called “random dungeon generation” and right then and there I decided that no one but I would work on this project!

I began collaborating with the organization while working on my application document. I tried to elaborate on several parts: project decomposition on sub-tasks, time schedule, algorithms description. My would-be mentor asked potential participants to complete small tasks of their choice in order to confirm their ability to work with the code, a common practise among free software organizations. There was also a technical interview over IRC which is a bit unusual for Google Summer of Code and is not strictly required, but it was very interesting for me and very helpful as it turned out. Generally speaking, the student selection process varies a lot and depends on the organization.

When I started to work on my project random levels where quite simple, as you can see in the screenshot below.

It was tedious for players to roam within the dungeons so the aim of my project was to make it more clear and I used various techniques in order to do this. First, I split some of the dungeon rooms with a bit of empty space so they did not look adjacent anymore. Next, I made themed rooms that contained various types of objects. Finally, I turned some rooms into corridors so the level did not just look like a bunch of cells. The final look is illustrated below.

The last part of my project was devoted to the brand new random level types - random open areas. Though I initially marked it as an extra project in my plan (a “bonus” project), I managed to complete it before the summer was over. Along with dungeons there are open levels in the game mostly containing natural objects: why can’t we have those be random as well? For generating these levels types I used a fractals-based approach yielding natural looking areas based on an initial shape that is preserved. On the following screenshot you can see how a random level can be generated with a shape describing a path:

Apart from the priceless experience in learning how to write free software, there was another positive element in my participation to Google Summer of Code: I significantly improved my English. The reason was my strict mentor who was adamant on having me correct the grammar mistakes in my code comments as well as in regular chat conversations. I believe I do not have to insist on the importance of English in the field of software development. Finally, I think that the experience and the title of Google Summer of Code student substantially helped me find a full-time job after graduation. I had two on-site interviews with one of the world’s most famous corporations and finally got a great offer from a local company. I wish every student developer had the opportunity to be a Google Summer of Code student at least once.

By Alexander Solovets, Google Summer of Code 2010 student

Mentoring Organizations for Google Summer of Code 2012 Announced

2012-03-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. After reviewing 406 applications, we have chosen 180 open source projects, of which 41 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2012 program website for a complete list of the accepted projects.

Students wishing to apply for Google Summer of Code will have the next 10 days to learn more about the accepted projects before student applications open on Monday, March 26, 2012 at 19:00 UTC.

Students will want to pay close attention to the Ideas Pages for the organizations they wish to work with over the summer and consider how they would like to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest something. Organizations have listed points of contact on their Ideas Page so that students can contact the organization directly to submit a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 8th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Gephi: how 3 years of Google Summer of Code made us great

2012-03-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene-protein interaction networks are just a few examples. Gephi began as a university student project four years ago and has quickly become an open source software leader in the visualization and analysis of large networks. It is an important contribution to the ecosystem of tools used by researchers and big data analysts to explore and extract value from the deluge of relational data and disseminate a better understanding for people to think about a “connected” world.

Gephi is a “Photoshop” for such data: designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and communication. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal the properties of complex and messy data. The goal is to help data analysts make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections.

Our success was made much faster thanks to the Google Summer of Code. The timing of our acceptance into our first Google Summer of Code in 2009 was perfect: we were at the point where we could make the project really open in the way our infrastructure could scale code, and our human organization was ready to welcome contributors. Participating in the program gave us a boost of fame helping us promote the project and created an international community for Gephi.

We met many people and learned a lot, but this is the most important lesson to share: though students are paid stipends for their work during the program, money should not be the first incentive. To encourage students to stick with the project, we talk with each of them to find their deeper motivations in working on Gephi and try and develop a win-win situation. And it works! Many of the students continue to contribute to the project for at least a few months after the end of the Google Summer of Code program, and others have gone on to become members of our team.

We recognize this long-term investment by promoting their work, like André Panisson who released a plug-in in 2010, which connects Gephi to a graph stream and visualizes it in real-time. André made this amazing video of the Egyptian Revolution on Twitter, when he monitored the hashtag #jan25. More recently, Martin Škurla presented his work at FOSDEM 2012 and talked about his plug-in which connects Gephi to the graph database Neo4j. He started his project during the Google Summer of Code 2010 and continued his work until the release. We really appreciated the effort, so the Gephi Consortium and Neo Technologies Inc. paid his expenses to attend the conference. Finally, I must talk about Eduardo Ramos, who we rejected as a student two years ago for Google Summer of Code but who was so motivated that he decided to contribute to Gephi anyway, becoming one of the project leaders, a Google Summer of Code mentor... and a friend!

To learn more about Gephi, watch our madness screencast and view our previous Google Summer of Code projects here. Want to apply for Gephi? Join us on the forum.

By Sébastien Heymann, co-founder of the Gephi project and Google Summer of Code administrator

NESCent evolves with Google Summer of Code

2012-03-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

For the fifth summer in a row, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) took part in the Google Summer of Code program and introduced students to open software development in the field of evolutionary biology. NESCent is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. During the summer eight students from the Google Summer of Code program worked remotely on a software project of their own choosing, each under the guidance of an experienced mentor.

NESCent’s 2011 Google Summer of Code students included Jan Engelhardt, Alexandru Lucian Ginsca, Sarah Hird, Peter Hoffman, Daniel Packer, Andrei-Alin Popescu, Apurv Verma, and Laurel Yohe. Their projects ranged from manipulating next-generation sequencing data for population genetic analysis, to enabling a frequently-used alignment viewer to analyze non-coding RNAs, to generating human readable text that could be integrated into the Encyclopedia of Life from ontologies containing phenotype data. As their profiles demonstrate, the students put their summer to very good use. Meet the students and learn more about their projects on our Phyloinformatics page.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, NESCent is jointly operated by Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University.

By Robin Smith, head of communications at NESCent