Free yourself to do the right thing…

Google Summer of Code™ 2008 [GSoC 2008] concluded on September 2, 2008 and I have successfully completed the program This post goes to thank everyone[1] who have, in some way or the other helped me during the project time line. This year’s summer of code student’s success rate is 83%.

1] A BIG “Thank You” to :

• Sahana - my GSoC organisation for selecting my project idea and giving me a chance to join in & contribute to the development.
• Fran Boon - My Mentor for the GSoC project [he rOcks!] for all the guidance and encouragement.
• Friends I made @ ##gsoc-india & #gsoc for the fun we had, the codes we discussed, the phone calls, the meetups etc etc! It was all motivating and pHun being with you all.
• My school mates, whom i got back to since I recovered from the “coma” of 4 years :P, who kept encouraging and helped getting back into the groove. Vivek, Akash, Pia.
• Few special friends who stayed along, kept pushing! [you know who you are don't you ;-)] OK. Kaps, Shellz, Rakesh!
• my room mates Nishant, Amit, Deepak, Chanpreet for being there!
• My parents for being there. And letting me cOde! in the oddly hours. My time table became opposite, sleep in the day and wake up in the night. Not exactly day & night, I used to code till 6 am, go for a jogging/running to further tire myself. Take a shower, have breakfast and off to sleep! To wake up at around 3-4 pm. Weird no ?
• School friends @ Bangalore with whom I stayed for a month and other friends from Wipro I met there. I had fun! Navin, Rahul, Ashish, Tariq.
• to Google for paying me! and now certifying me and promoting “Open Source”. And the t-shirt of course, the most important part!
• to Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, GSoC and the Open Source Programs Office team for handling the program of such a nature, with so little resources.
• again to Leslie Hawthorn, for being a mentor taking care of all the students! [I tell you her real name is Trinity, just that she only has 2 hands, but does equal multi-tasking as Trinity. ;-)]
• other hidden forces and people who worked towards making all this possible. Google Accounts dept, FedEx especially!

You may also want to check out the traditional map of Google Summer of Code 2008, which displays the connections between all of the mentors and students worldwide (KML - 1.4 MB, viewable with Google Earth or Google Maps.

No wonder this is a big post, if your interested in reading about my complete experience you can read on.

My Experience:

To share my experience, it was nice to get back to the good ol IRC days after like 4 years? Yes, while I was in school i used to hang around the IRC a lot, on EFNet. But then, I lost touch Ah right, I know my friends complaining I lost touch with a lot in the “4″ years. Anyways, it had all started last year, when I missed the Summer of Code application deadline and I wanted to participate. But this year I could make it, even though I had to miss my college assignment, I got a zero for late submission! yAy!!

But it was all for good, you win some you loose some, actually i didn’t loose much, I filled an EC [extenuating circumstance] with my GSoC application claiming the reason as, “Hey i was doing this and while printing out the assignment my printer jammed and it was deadline. So I didn’t have time left to either fix it or get it printed somewhere else. So I submitted the next day!”

What? I was just being honest?
My mentor was almost online daily during office hours, in #sahana and I never knew until the last moment that he is going to be my mentor. He suggested on the project idea and how well it can be done for best utility etc.  And not to mention that while working on the project, at times when I was clueless lost in mazes of possibilities, he would easily help me decipher whats core and do it

The Results:

Then the results announcement was one helluva night i was out in my balcony with my laptop connected to the Internet.. watching the mess in #gsoc and constantly refreshing my student dashboard to check the result. And it was slightly delayed by 10 minutes, and everybody was already shouting!! Ha ha.. then I saw the “Ranking in Progress”  change to “Application Accepted!!” and I am sure I would have woke up the whole colony, with the shout I made!! yAy!
Then I went to slept peacefully, with a smile :D. The next day what did I notice, my Inbox is full of hundreds of emails. All students were added to the Private GSoC students mailing list automatically and it was flooded with mails!! I went ahead and switched to “Digest Mode” delivery.. phew!

Community Bonding:

Community bonding period was supposed to be something to read documentation, discuss on the project idea with the mentor and the project community, bond with them etc.

And for the most of the time we did that enjoyed talking to people on IRC, met new people, fellow GSoC students from India in ##gsoc-india and others in #gsoc.

Working on the Sahana project, which is a huge system, understand it with whatever documentation you have, was all exciting. Trying hands on different bits of code, the CVS, working on both platforms, Windows and GNU/Linux. Oh firstly, doing the cellphone hunting was the most “eeky” part. I had to find out a phone which had support for SMS Send & Receive using AT commands. So I had to do a lot of hunting, bug a lot of people asking what phone they have. And in case they had the data cable, I’d ask them to plugin to their computer and try running few commands using minicom or HyperTerminal to find out if that model works for me. And yes thanks to “Ranjan bhaiya”, who gave me his phone. Not to mention, I somehow recalled he had that Samsung phone SGH-C100 which was in my list of compatible phones. I went to him, and asked if he still had the phone, luckily, he had it dusting somewhere. But it was working, except you couldn’t speak. The microphone was not working. But heck! The SMS worked ! So that phone was fit for my purpose. A special thanks to Sanjiv Singh too, a fellow GSoC 2008 student, who went to the market in Delhi to do some hunting for me too and got a phone/cable

Project progress and updates were posted here, here & here. Link to my GSoC app is here. I talk about the project part in another post.

About the program/Learning outcomes:

Working in Google Summer of Code™ 2008 has been an enlightening experience and a motivating one for me. It’s nice to see what Google does to promote “Open Source” and encourage new talent, and help the organisations and several projects to get more developers contributing to them. That’s the main objective of the program, get more developers and see them mature as ongoing contributors to the project. I mean that is how everyone wins! The OS ideology, the coding fun, the organisations, the participating developers. That is what we call “Feel the love” the love for code.

You get to work with different people from other parts of the world, get exposed to a different and koOler way of development, community based, where you get contributions from developers round the world. Getting to see what just a plain text editors can do so when someone asks me what IDE I used. I’d say gedit or NotePad++ [since I worked on both platforms]. You get to exchange ideas on development practices, coding techniques, testing, UI, what not! The channel had developers and experts from all domains. Although I have been working on and developing using Open Source tools & technologies, I was never an active part of an Open Source project. So this program, gave me a chance to just do that, and stick around as a contributor in one of the respected FOSS projects, Sahana.

The exciting part was, seeing people even younger than me, hack stuff like the kernel and get to see them in action with their programming skills during the program and people from all age groups! The program sure does attract a diverse range of contributors to the projects and bringing them all together. This is an immense asset to the program, truly speaking, which comes into reality due to the fact that around 175 Open Source organisations/projects registered this year for the program and receive the funding for student development, and this in turn brings all those 175 communities together in some way. So this gives you a chance to meet and talk to some really brilliant and wonderful people.

Its because of this program, I happened to meet one of the active Openmoko and FOSS contributor from India who in turn suggested me to use Openmoko in “some way” for Sahana, while I was giving a talk as a GSoC student at mukt.in 2008. And what now, I am working on a project that just does that Thanks to Shakthi Kannan! So it was a Sahana developer, meeting an Openmoko developer exchanging ideas and cook up something even more exciting! Get the code love part ?

For someone who is new to all this, this program helps you take the first step in a concrete manner and kind of puts you on the right track and from there, you just keep discovering more avenues of success doing things that you love.

To Sum Up:

To end this blog post, I’d like to quote and provide some motivation to anyone who’d like to contribute to Open Source or participate in the program, take a look at this!

A 12 year old GSoC mentor and a Drupal Core developer, Mr. Dmitri Gaskin giving a tech-talk. In the video you also hear and see our very own Leslie Hawthorn introducing Dmitri. The post here, shows you how Open Source is kOol and Google too! This sure would act as some motivation to coders who think, things are impossible or difficult!

Trust me, knowledge speaks for itself, and hard work pays! So just get “oN” it

And yes, I lOve you All!

Your Truly,

Ajay “AJuOnLiNE” Kumar.