Ok, here is another post after a long desert – no excuses here, I’ve forgoton that I even have a blog. But now feel like writing something after seeing the new WordPress dashboard 🙂
First thing on the agenda is GSoC 2008. As you all know Google Summer of Code 2008 is on the way this year too and in case you have been living under a rock, here is the event.
GSoC is a good breeding ground for fresh FOSS developments and had been one for me last year when I tried GSoC for the first time. Even though initially I wasn’t planning to try out for GSoC this year, after seeing some cool ideas from few organizations I felt like giving a try.
I found 2 ideas from Eclipse foundation and Apache very exciting but finally had to leave out one because I hadn’t enough energy nor time for 2 proposals. So I tried for Eclipse – creating a new plug-in for XQuery syntax editing which I found the idea is most appealing. One reason is I had been working with XML and Java stuff for a longest of my time and second one is I’ve been using Eclipse for my python works, so felt like returning the favour. So I prepared the proposal, submitted it and got accepted this year round too 🙂 All thanks should go to my mentor David and congrats to my fellow Vesess colleague Sameera, who also got accepted for GSoC this year for Coppermine photo gallery. By the way, if this helps any future GSoCer, here is my complete proposal.
But beyond my not-so-dramatic GSoC tale, I was able to give something else for GSoC.
First thing is I submitted a translated Sinhala version of GSoC flyer this year. The second is I was able to put a small guiding doc for Gnome GSoCers, doing my things right as a responsible Gnome GSoCer last year. Other than that, I was able to encourage few of my buddies to apply for GSoC rather than trying for evil MS Imagine Cup 😀
So the end of the line is that I’m hoping for another nice, fruitful 3 months with GSoC working for Eclispe and hope the experience will be great as was in last year.