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Posts Tagged with “soc”

Mentoring is fun…

I get a big kick out of mentoring students, you learn a lot about yourself and in my case, have the opportunity to selfishly spread the Eclipse love. My first experience in remote student mentoring was with Remy Suen two years ago and I have improved my technique a bit (sorry for you being the guinea pig Remy ;p). One of my students (Rafael) this summer in the GSOC program has been working on the Declarative Services tooling in the PDE incubator.

How did we get started? The first thing I did was stub some code out for Rafael. I create three skeleton plug-ins representing core, ui and tests pieces. I introduced him to project sets which make it a bit easier to checkout the code into your workspace. After that, I started to create a basic plan for him to follow using bugzilla defects. He also started to follow the PDE Incubators inbox to triage bugs when they came in (that’s a very good committer skill to have ;p). I then introduced Rafael to Mylyn and EclEmma to help his workflow a bit:

With those tools installed, you get a better idea of what needs to be done (via Mylyn) and also the current code coverage (via EclEmma). We have been able to move faster with these tools installed towards our goal of having a nice and shiny Declarative Services editor in Eclipse. This wouldn’t be possible without the extensive set of tools available in the Eclipse ecosystem.

So feel free to spread the Eclipse love and show any students (or colleagues) some of the cool tools you’re using in Eclipse to improve your workflow.

Eclipse GSOC Deadline is Monday

The deadline for GSOC applications is Monday the 31st. If you’re a student, please check out the growing list of Eclipse-related ideas.

A new proposal trickled in from the Equinox team this morning… if you’re interested in hard computational problems and the Equinox runtime resolver… you may be interested in the Equinox and SAT4J project proposal. This is an opportunity to do some deep diving in Equinox if you’re interested…

There’s also a lot of interesting proposals from the Platform Workspace team involving improving the state of compare workflows. If someone implements comparing two folders they would be my hero.

If you’re a student, why not give these project ideas a shot or submit your own? I think hacking Eclipse as part of GSOC can make you some more money than mining for things in World of Warcraft over the summer. $4500… you can buy 10,000 cans of cheap American beer with that. A bit less if you want to upscale it and go for good imports of German or Belgian beer.

Think about it.

Eclipse and Google SOC Reminder!

Here’s a gentle reminder that the Google Summer of Code(GSOC) program is starting to accept applications today. If you want your project at Eclipse involved, I highly recommend putting an idea out on Eclipse’s GSOC idea’s page and start idling on #eclipse-soc (hunting for students).

The response so far from students has been amazing… I already have a student helping me hack some Declarative Services (DS) tooling. That happened about 3 days after I posted the idea… phew…!

As a committer, you’ll be amazed what results you can get from the SOC program if you are just willing to give a bit of time to mentor some amazing students. Remember that, “mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.” 🙂

Eclipse’s Google Summer of Code 2007 Results

Each year after Google’s Summer of Code (SOC) program is over, Google holds an informal Mentor Summit (unconference style) at their HQ to allow mentors to meet each other and talk about their experiences. I will be representing Eclipse with a couple other mentors at the summit (if there are any Eclipse developers in the area that want to chat over a frosty beverage, let me know) this Friday. I plan on holding a session about tooling in general. There were a couple other open-source projects like Joomla and GIT that had students working on Eclipse-related tooling… finding out how things went for them, what pain points they had and how to better work with other open-source projects next year that decide to do Eclipse-tooling with students.

I’m a big fan of the SOC program as it’s an excellent way to attract contributors, meet new people and build cool technology. In my case this year, Ian Bull did some fantastic work around Plug-in Visualization which has always been a pain point with plug-in developers. As part of that work I was even able to push my own “Eclipse agenda” and get a visualization toolkit Ian help write into GEF (164387,205121). One step closer to that lightweight visualization toolkit I want in the SDK 🙂

Last but not least, here is the full list of Eclipse’s Summer of Code results:

  • UI for the equinox provisioning
    • Student: Prashant Deva
    • Mentor(s): Philippe Ombredanne (IRC: pombreda), Andrew Overholt (IRC: overholt), Pascal Rapicault (IRC: LeNettoyeur)
  • NetBeans in Eclipse
    • Student: Beyhan Osmanov Veliev (IRC: beyhan)
    • Mentor(s): Philippe Ombredanne (IRC: pombreda)

The real world of license hell

See anything missing from there? Google does a great job with its SOC program, but I think from an Eclipse perspective, there’s something missing about what type of licenses students can choose from that box. I think Google’s initial intentions were good (ie., not to confuse students), but in the real world there’s a ton of licenses out there and as a software engineer, you have to learn about them (even funny ones like BeerWare). Maybe Google could be more instructive to students about the various licenses and even categorize them like the OSI.