Category Archives: Open Source Blog

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From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich

Omnitone: Spatial audio on the web


Spatial audio is a key element for an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience. By bringing spatial audio to the web, the browser can be transformed into a complete VR media player with incredible reach and engagement. That’s why the Chrome WebAudio team has created and is releasing the Omnitone project, an open source spatial audio renderer with the cross-browser support.

Our challenge was to introduce the audio spatialization technique called ambisonics so the user can hear the full-sphere surround sound on the browser. In order to achieve this, we implemented the ambisonic decoding with binaural rendering using web technology. There are several paths for introducing a new feature into the web platform, but we chose to use only the Web Audio API. In doing so, we can reach a larger audience with this cross-browser technology, and we can also avoid the lengthy standardization process for introducing a new Web Audio component. This is possible because the Web Audio API provides all the necessary building blocks for this audio spatialization technique.



Omnitone Audio Processing Diagram

The AmbiX format recording, which is the target of the Omnitone decoder, contains 4 channels of audio that are encoded using ambisonics, which can then be decoded into an arbitrary speaker setup. Instead of the actual speaker array, Omnitone uses 8 virtual speakers based on an the head-related transfer function (HRTF) convolution to render the final audio stream binaurally. This binaurally-rendered audio can convey a sense of space when it is heard through headphones.

The beauty of this mechanism lies in the sound-field rotation applied to the incoming spatial audio stream. The orientation sensor of a VR headset or a smartphone can be linked to Omnitone’s decoder to seamlessly rotate the entire sound field. The rest of the spatialization process will be handled automatically by Omnitone. A live demo can be found at the project landing page.

Throughout the project, we worked closely with the Google VR team for their VR audio expertise. Not only was their knowledge on the spatial audio a tremendous help for the project, but the collaboration also ensured identical audio spatialization across all of Google’s VR applications - both on the web and Android (e.g. Google VR SDK, YouTube Android app). The Spatial Media Specification and HRTF sets are great examples of the Google VR team’s efforts, and Omnitone is built on top of this specification and HRTF sets.

With emerging web-based VR projects like WebVR, Omnitone’s audio spatialization can play a critical role in a more immersive VR experience on the web. Web-based VR applications will also benefit from high-quality streaming spatial audio, as the Chrome Media team has recently added FOA compression to the open source audio codec Opus. More exciting things like VR view integration, higher-order ambisonics and mobile web support will also be coming soon to Omnitone.

We look forward to seeing what people do with Omnitone now that it's open source. Feel free to reach out to us or leave a comment with your thoughts and feedback on the issue tracker on GitHub.

By Hongchan Choi and Raymond Toy, Chrome Team

Due to the incomplete implementation of multichannel audio decoding on various browsers, Omnitone does not support mobile web at the time of writing.

Kubernetes 1.3 is here!

With all of the excitement being generated around the Kubernetes 1.3 release and the first anniversary of Kubernetes 1.0 (#k8sbday), now is a great time to point out some of the features that enterprise users should be taking note of.

If you’re not familiar with Kubernetes, let me get you up to speed.

Kubernetes is an open-source container automation framework that builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google. Once you declare a desired state, Kubernetes works to drive your system toward that state. As a developer this means less time handling trivial tasks that a computer can automate and more time focusing on developing applications that provide value to users.

Additionally, Kubernetes aims to be a framework that you can operate at planetary scale, run anywhere, and never outgrow.

With the release of Kubernetes 1.3, Kubernetes is closer than ever to meeting those goals; the 1.3 release adds exciting features such as:
Aside from features, the coolest part about working with Kubernetes is hearing user stories. I’ll soon be publishing an interview with Joseph Jacks, co-founder of Kismatic, the enterprise Kubernetes company, on the Kubernetes blog.

Joseph is very active in the Kubernetes community and has extensive experience with Kubernetes in production. In the interview I ask him why he bet his business on Kubernetes, what could be better, and how he sees Kubernetes growing in the near future.

Kubernetes has many, many features to offer that I didn’t get to cover in this short write-up. If you know anyone that needs to ramp up on Kubernetes, the easiest way is the free course I created with Kelsey Hightower, Scalable Microservices with Kubernetes. The course covers the basic features of Kubernetes. If you want an overview of what’s new in Kubernetes 1.3, feel free to look at the “What’s new in Kubernetes 1.3” video or slides.

Finally for a more in-depth look at the 1.3 release, make sure to check out: 5 days of Kubernetes 1.3 blog series.

Want to learn more about container orchestration and cloud native platforms? Here’s some recommended reading to follow up with:
By Carter Morgan, Developer Programs Engineer

Announcing an Open Source ADC board for BeagleBone

Cross posted on the Google Research Blog
Working with electronics, we often find ourselves soldering up a half baked electronic circuit to detect some sort of signal. For example, last year we wanted to measure the strength of a carrier. We started with traditional analog circuits — amplifier, filter, envelope detector, threshold. You can see some of our prototypes in the image below; they get pretty messy.


While there's a certain satisfaction in taming a signal using the physical properties of capacitors, coils of wire and transistors, it's usually easier to digitize the signal with an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) and manage it with Digital Signal Processing (DSP) instead of electronic parts. Tweaking software doesn't require a soldering iron, and lets us modify signals in ways that would require impossible analog circuits.


There are several standard solutions for digitizing a signal: connect a laptop to an oscilloscope or Data Acquisition System (DAQ) via USB or Ethernet, or use the onboard ADCs of a maker board like an Arduino. The former are sensitive and accurate, but also big and power hungry. The latter are cheap and tiny, but slower and have enough RAM for only milliseconds worth of high speed sample data.  


That led us to investigate single board computers like the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi, which are small and cheap like an Arduino, but have specs like a smartphone.  And crucially, the BeagleBone's system-on-a-chip (SoC) combines a beefy ARMv7 CPU with two smaller Programmable Realtime Units (PRUs) that have access to all 512MB of system RAM.  This lets us dedicate the PRUs to the time-sensitive and repetitive task of reading each sample out of an external ADC, while the main CPU lets us use the data with the GNU/Linux tools we're used to.


The result is an open source BeagleBone cape we've named PRUDAQ.  It's built around the Analog Devices AD9201 ADC, which samples two inputs simultaneously at up to 20 megasamples per second, per channel.  Simultaneous sampling and high sample rates make it useful for software-defined radio (SDR) and scientific applications where a built-in ADC isn't quite up to the task.  


Our open source electrical design and sample code are available on GitHub, and GroupGets has boards ready to ship for $79.  We also were fortunate to have help from Google intern Kumar Abhishek. He added support for PRUDAQ to his Google Summer of Code project BeagleLogic that performs much better than our sample code.


We started PRUDAQ for our own needs, but quickly realized that others might also find it useful. We're excited to get your feedback through the email list.  Tell us what can be done with inexpensive fast ADCs paired with inexpensive fast CPUs!

Posted by Jason Holt, Software Engineer

Lessons from Professors’ Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) 2016


From Google Summer of Code to Google Code-in, the Open Source Programs Office does a lot to get students involved with open source. In order to learn more about supporting open source in academia, I attended the NSF funded Professors' Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) in Philadelphia. It was a great opportunity for us to better understand the challenges instructors face in weaving open source into their curriculum and hear solutions on how to bridge the gap.

Almost 30 university professors and community college lecturers attended the 3-day workshop. During the workshop, attendees worked in small groups getting hands on experience incorporating humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) into their teaching. Professors were able to talk, mingle and share best practices throughout the event.

The POSSE workshop is led by Heidi Ellis, Professor, Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at Western New England University, and Greg Hislop, Professor of Software Engineering and Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Drexel University. Heidi and Greg took over running POSSE five years after Red Hat began the program as an outreach effort to the higher education community. Red Hat continues as a collaborator in the effort. Around 40 university and community college professors participate in the program every year with over 100 individuals attending the workshop in the last four years.

Here are some of the challenges professors shared:
  • Very little guidance on how to bring FOSS into the classroom. No standard curriculum / syllabus available to reference. 
  • Time investment required to change the curriculum.
  • Will not be rewarded for teaching FOSS courses.
  • Will not get funds to travel for workshops/conferences unless it’s to present a paper at a conference.
  • Many administrations aren’t aware that adding open source is beneficial for students since more and more companies use open source and expect their new hires to be familiar with it.

The next POSSE will be Nov 17-19. Faculty who are interested in attending POSSE, please click here to apply.

We also discussed a number of open source programs that are currently working to engage students with open source software development:

Thanks to Heidi, Greg and the FOSS2Serve team for organizing POSSE 2016! We look forward to taking what we’ve learned and using it to better support FOSS education in academia.

By Feiran Helen Hu, Open Source Programs Office

GitHub on BigQuery: Analyze all the code

Posted by Felipe Hoffa, Google Developer Advocate

Google, in collaboration with GitHub, is releasing an incredible new open dataset on Google BigQuery. So far you've been able to monitor and analyze GitHub's pulse since 2011 (thanks GitHub Archive project!) and today we're adding the perfect complement to this. What could you do if you had access to analyze all the open source software in the world, with just one SQL command?

The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you'll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query. This will open the doors to all kinds of new insights and advances that we're just beginning to envision.

For example, let's say you're the author of a popular open source library. Now you'll be able to find every open source project on GitHub that's using it. Even more, you'll be able to guide the future of your project by analyzing how it's being used, and improve your APIs based on what your users are actually doing with it.

On the security side, we've seen how the most popular open source projects benefit from having multiple eyes and hands working on them. This visibility helps projects get hardened and buggy code cleaned up. What if you could search for errors with similar patterns in every other open source project? Would you notify their authors and send them pull requests? Well, now you can. Some concepts to keep in mind while working with BigQuery and the GitHub contents dataset:
To learn more, read GitHub's announcement and try some sample queries. Share your queries and findings in our reddit.com/r/bigquery and Hacker News posts. The ideas are endless, and I'll start collecting tips and links to other articles on this post on Medium.

Stay curious!

More statistics from Google Summer of Code 2016

Google Summer of Code
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016 is officially at its halfway point. Mentors and students have just completed their midterm evaluations and it’s time for our second stats post. This time we take a closer look at our participating students.

First, we’d like to highlight the universities with the most student participants. Congratulations are due to the International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad for claiming the top spot for the third consecutive year!

Country School 2016 Accepted Students 2015 Accepted Students 12 Year Total
India International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad 50 62 252
Sri Lanka University of Moratuwa 29 44 320
Romania University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest 24 14 155
India Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa Campus 22 15 110
India Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani Campus 22 18 116
India Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay 18 13 75
India Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 15 8 92
India Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee 15 8 57
India Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology 15 7 27
India Amrita Institute Of Technology & Science, Amritapuri 13 5 33
India Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati 13 5 38
Cameroon University of Buea 12 10 26
India Delhi Technological University 12 9 60
India Indian Institute of Technology BHU Varanasi 12 12 37
Germany TU Munich 11 7 45


Next, we are proud to announce that 2016 marks the largest number of female GSoC participants to date — 12% of accepted students are female, up 2.2% from 2015. This is good progress, but we are certain we can do better in the future to diversify our program. The Google Open Source team will continue our outreach to many organizations, for example, Grace Hopper and Black Girls Code, to increase this number even more 2017. If you have any suggestions of organizations we should work with, please let us know in the comments.

Finally, each year we like to look at the majors of students. As expected, the most common area of study for our participants is Computer Science (approximately 78%), but this year we have a wide variety of studies including Linguistics, Law, Music Technology and Psychology.  The majority of our students this year are undergraduates (67%), followed by Masters (23%) and then PhD students (9%).



Although reviewing GSoC statistics each year is great fun, we want to stress that being “first place” is not the point of the program. Our goal is to get more and more students involved in creating free and open source software. We hope Google Summer of Code encourages contributions to projects that have the potential to make a difference worldwide. Congratulations to the students from all over the globe and keep up the good work!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs Office

Coding has begun for Google Summer of Code 2016

2016 Google Summer of Code


Today marks the start of coding for the 12th annual Google Summer of Code. With the community bonding period complete, about 1,200 students now begin 12 weeks of writing code for 178 different open source organizations.

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. Stay tuned as we will highlight some of the new mentoring organizations over the next few months.

Have a great summer and happy coding!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office