Google Summer of Code Summit Day

Last weekend I was privileged enough to visit San Francisco for a trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. Google provided a summit day for SoC mentors from various organisations to attend and discuss aspects of the program. With over 100 mentors and admins from most of the involved organisation, it was great to meet such a variety of people from different backgrounds.

I met Tobias from the xmms2 project, and it was interesting to discuss the different design decisions and architectures between amarok and xmms2. It was great, but we clearly know who is winning . Mike Smith of xiph.org/gstreamer/fluendo jumped in and asked why xmms2/kde do not use gstreamer as the main backend, and I quickly had to explain and defend Mattias’s viewpoint for the existance of phonon. Interestingly enough, Tobias had similar views (and he also loves Qt4, so it was easy to like him). We also discussed to possibility of a common dbus standard for interfacing with media applications, so that 3rd party apps and scripts did not have to special case interfacing with each application.

Over the day there were many good presentations, such as Brian and Ben’s Poisonous People Talk which I would recommend – dealing with the difficult. The “sticky” talk, where attendants were able to grill the SoC panel for all things bad and good was also eye opening. Some interesting points that came up:

• The summer of code won’t get much larger
• It is unlikely that KOffice will be allowed to split from the KDE projects
• If you want more projects, get involved with the community more and be known!
• Crappy organisations and mentors won’t come back next year
• Smaller organisations will be rotated to give everyone a fair chance

Another high point of the summit was lunch, where we were served steak and had big long chats about all things technical and social.

A group photo for the summit day (photo by David Anderson):

(see if you can find me)