Tag Archives: wrap-up

Stories from Google Code-in: Sugar Labs and Systers

Google Code-in (GCI) is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the final installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first three posts.

The Google Code-in contest begins on Monday, November 28th at 9am PT for students. Right now you can learn more about the 17 mentoring organizations that students will be able to work with by going to the contest site. To get students excited for GCI 2016, we’re sharing three more stories from GCI 2015 grand prize winners. These stories illustrate how global the competition is, the challenges students face and the valuable skills they learn working with these open source organizations.

IMG_20160614_152138.jpg
A group of Google Code-in 2015 mentors joined grand prize winners for a day of exploring
San Francisco including the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
First up is the story of Ezequiel Pereira, a student from Uruguay who worked with Sugar Labs. Sugar Labs is the organization behind Sugar, the operating system for the OLPC XO-1 which the Uruguayan government has distributed to public primary schools. The XO-1 was Ezequiel’s first computer.

Ezequiel’s curiosity in computer science was piqued when a technician came to his school to solve a simple bug that was affecting most XO’s. The technician used the command line which, up to that point, Ezequiel thought was useless. Realizing that the command line offered him a lot of power, Ezequiel began his exploration.

He discovered Google Code-in by reading about another Uruguayan teenager, one who was a grand prize winner in Google Code-in 2012. Ezequiel jumped into the contest and participated for several years expanding his skills before finishing as a grand prize winner of Google Code-in 2015. Along the way Ezequiel got comfortable with IRC and began helping other students, even finding new friends among along the way.


Next we have Sara Du from the United States. Sara had been coding for six months when she discovered Google Code-in on Christmas Eve, halfway through the competition. She found lots of interesting tasks, but had trouble finding the right organization to focus on before selecting Systers.

Like many students, Sara was able to quickly jump into code but spent a couple days just getting acquainted with Git and GitHub. This is something we hear from a lot of students and it’s just one of the skills that they pick up by working on real-world projects, along with testing and communication.

Another challenge Sara faced was working with a mentor 16 time zones away from her, which meant that correspondence would often take a day or two. While this was a challenge, she found the long feedback loop encouraged her to get on the Slack channel and reach out to other contributors for help. Ultimately, this made her even more a part of the Systers community.

Sara said Google Code-in was one of the most awesome experiences she’s had and has this advice to offer future participants: “The organization you end up working with has a vibrant community of hackers from everywhere; try to interact with them and you will be sure to learn from others as they will from you!”


Last, but certainly not least, we have Ahmed Sabie, a student from Canada who also worked with Systers. Ahmed started coding competitively several years ago, focusing on graph theory, dynamic programming and data structures. He loved the problem solving, but knew that these competitions took place in a sandbox. To grow, Ahmed would need to explore.

Enter Google Code-in. Ahmed was most comfortable with Python and saw that the Systers Volunteer Management System used that language, so that’s where he started.

Ahmed, like many students and even professional developers, spent much of his first week setting up his development environment. It was a grueling process but with the help of search and the people in the Systers Slack channel he was finally able to see the project’s login screen.

As he completed easy tasks, Ahmed moved on to more difficult tasks and began to help other students, many who got stuck on the same issues he had encountered earlier. Ahmed found that each task provided an opportunity to stretch his skills a little bit more. He was excited about how quickly he was learning. Though Ahmed learned a lot on his own, he says the vast majority of what he learned was through the help of other people -- students, mentors and other project contributors -- and that he felt like he was truly a part of the Systers community by the end of the process. 

Ahmed’s favorite task was an appropriate finale for the competition: he added multilingual support to an application he had worked on and added the French translation.
“Overall, Google Code-in was the experience of a lifetime. It set me up for the future, by teaching me relevant and critical skills necessary in software development. I have contributed to a good cause, and met fantastic mentors and friends along the way. Open source development is not a onetime thing, it is an ongoing process. I hope to continue to be part of it, and to me it is a form of volunteering and giving back to the community.” - Ahmed Sabie

With that, we conclude our series of posts reflecting on Google Code-in 2015. We thank Ezequiel, Sara, Ahmed and all the other participants for sharing their stories and contributing to the software we all rely on. We hope you will join us in carrying on the tradition with Google Code-in 2016!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: Linux XIA

We're sharing guest posts from students, mentors and organization administrators who participated in Google Summer of Code 2016. This is the fifth post in that series and there are more on the way.


Linux XIA is the native implementation of XIA, a meta network architecture that supports evolution of all of its components, which we call “principals,” and promotes interoperability between these principals. It is the second year that our organization, Boston University / XIA, has participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and this year we received 31 proposals from 8 countries.

Our ideas list this year focused on upgrading key forwarding data structures to their best known versions. Our group chose the most deserving students for each of the following projects:

Accelerating the forwarding speed of the LPM principal with poptrie

Student André Ferreira Eleuterio and mentor Cody Doucette implemented the first version of the LPM principal in Linux XIA for GSoC 2015. The LPM principal enables Linux XIA to leverage routing tables derived from BGP, OSPF, IS-IS and any other IP routing protocol to forward XIA packets natively, that is, without encapsulation in IP. For GSoC 2016, student Vaibhav Raj Gupta from India partnered with mentor Cody Doucette to speed up the LPM principal by employing a state-of-the-art data structure to find the longest prefix matching using general purpose processors: poptrie.

Upgrading the FIB hash table of principals to the relativistic hash table

Principals that rely on routing flat names have used a resizable hash table that supports lockless readers since 2011. While this data structure was unique in 2011, in the same year, relativistic hash tables were published. The appeal to upgrade to relativistic hash tables was twofold: reduced memory footprint per hashed element, and the fact they were implemented in the Linux kernel in 2014. Student Sachin Paryani, also from India, worked with mentor Qiaobin Fu to replace our resizable hash table with the relativistic hash table.

Google Summer of Code nurtures a brighter future. Thanks to GSoC, our project has received important code contributions, and our community has been enlarged. It was rewarding to learn that two of our GSoC students have decided to pursue graduate school after their GSoC experience with us: Pranav Goswami (2015) and Sachin Paryani (2016). We hope these examples will motivate other students to do their best because the world is what we make of it.

By Michel Machado, Boston University / XIA organization administrator

Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: Debian

This is the fourth post in our series of wrap-ups and guest posts from participants reflecting on Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. Explore the first three posts and stay tuned for more wrap-ups and announcements.



Debian, founded in 1993, is a project aimed at building a 100% free and open source “Universal Operating System.” It’s a volunteer-driven project based on Linux, FreeBSD
and Hurd kernels for devices ranging from mobile phones to large clusters.

Being a wide umbrella project, Debian offered a diverse array of opportunities for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. For example, students worked on making our distribution more trustworthy (reproducible builds), porting our OS to Android devices and improving infrastructure for developers. This year I joined the Debian Real-Time Communications (RTC) mentoring team which engaged 13 students to improve voice, video and chat communication with free software.

WebRTC, an open standard enabling real-time video and audio communication in the browser, is central to this work. It was used to create JSCommunicator, an embeddable WebRTC phone developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, supporting voice, video and chat using SIP over WebSockets. A GSoC 2014 student, Juliana Louback, significantly enhanced JSCommunicator during her summer with Debian.

JSCommunicator is now being adapted for use with content management systems (CMS) and blogging platforms, making it easy to embed rich communication features in existing systems. It was this work that our current GSoC students built on.

This year I mentored GSoC student Mesut Can Gurle who used DruCall, a Drupal module for integrating JSCommunicator, as inspiration for building WPCall for WordPress. With this new plug-in, standards-based voice, video and chat is now available on the world’s two most popular CMS without the need for browser plugins.

The way WPCall was extrapolated from the DruCall plugin provides a pattern that other communities can follow to rapidly create WebRTC plugins for their own web frameworks. The JSCommunicator Integration Guide provides step-by-step instructions that developers and future students can follow. If you’re interested in learning more about significant developments in this space, please subscribe to the Free-RTC Announce mailing list and follow planet.freertc.org.

This was my first year as a GSoC mentor and I had such a great experience. It was rewarding working with Mesut on achieving his goals and we learned a lot along the way. Despite some setbacks (he narrowly missed a bombing as his country experienced an attempted coup), Mesut has made valuable contributions to free software.

As the summer wound down, I received an invitation to participate in a t-shirt design contest for the annual Mentor Summit. I thought it would be fun to try and put together a design focusing on GSoC’s key values.

The front of the t-shirt shows developers from all over the world collaborating on free software, representing the amazing scope and diversity of the projects. On the back, above the clouds, a space shuttle symbolizes what’s achieved through GSoC.

A group of attendees wearing the Google Summer of Code 2016 Mentor Summit t-shirt.

Happily, my design was selected and it was great seeing all the attendees wearing it at the Mentor Summit!

By Bruno Magalhães, Mentor for Debian

Google Summer of Code 2016 blog post round-up

We’re publishing guest posts from Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students, mentors and organizations every week and more are coming. Many have already written GSoC wrap-up posts on their own blogs, so we’ve rounded them up for you to explore.


“Static types in Python, oh my(py)!” by Tim Abbott, org admin for Zulip
“We posted mypy annotations as one of our project ideas for Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We found an incredible student, Eklavya Sharma, for the project. Eklavya did the vast majority of the hard work of annotating Zulip. Amazingly, he also found the time during the summer to migrate Zulip to use virtualenvs and then upgrade Zulip to Python 3!”


“A road from Google Summer of Code student to organization administrator” by Araz Abishov, org admin for HISP
“Google has created unprecedented opportunity both for young developers and open source communities, which I think everyone should take advantage of. GSoC is more than just a three months internship, and I hope that this post will be a good example of how it can change anyone’s life.”


“Summer of Code 2016: Wrapping it up” by Martin Braun, org admin for GNU Radio
“This summer was a great summer in terms of student participation. All three students will be presenting their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.”


“2016 Google Summer of Code Wrap-Up” by Ed Cable, org admin for Mifos Initiative
“Each year GSoC continues to unite and grow our community in different ways. Once again, we received incredibly valuable contributions to our Mifos X web and mobile clients this summer; most importantly we have cultivated numerous passionate contributors that will be a part of our community long into the future.”


“Road to GSoC 2016” by Minh Chu, student who worked on Neverland for KDE
“I was nervous about choosing a project. So many projects and requirements! After many hours, I finally decided to write a proposal for KDE’s Neverland Theme Builder and was accepted.”


“Git Rev News” by Christian Couder, mentor for Git
“Such performance improvements as well as the code consolidations around the sequencer are of course very nice. It is interesting and satisfying to see that they are the result of building on top of previous work over the years by GSoC students, mentors and reviewers.”


“Google Summer of Code 2016 Conclusion” by Amine Khaldi, org admin for ReactOS
“Students stumble upon many of the same difficulties ReactOS' own senior developers encountered during their early days, including that ever painful but necessary step to using a proper debugger instead of relying on printf statements in the code.”


“My Journey in Open Source / How to Get Started Contributing” by Nelson Liu, student who worked on scikit-learn for PSF
“The best way to get started is to simply jump in! There are a myriad of ways to contribute to an open source project. Obviously, writing code to fix bugs, add new features, or enhance existing ones are useful. However, you don't have to write code to help out!”


“Lasp and the Google Summer of Code” by Borja o’Cook, student who worked on Lasp for BEAM Community
“All in all, it's been an amazing experience. I've received a lot of support from my mentors and teammates; the Lasp team is full of incredible people.”


“GSoC 2016 Students in TEAMMATES” by Damith C. Rajapakse, org admin for TEAMMATES
“We had our biggest batch of students (7 students) in GSoC 2016, selected from 93 proposals, and representing 4 countries and 4 universities, working on TEAMMATES (an online feedback management system for education) and related sub projects.”


“User-friendly encryption now in Drupal 8!” by Colan Schwartz, mentor for Drupal
“There were several students interested in the topic, and wrote proposals to match. Talha Paracha's excellent proposal was accepted, and he began in earnest. With Adam Bergstein (nerdstein) and I mentoring him, Talha successfully worked through all phases of the project.”


“GSoC with Shogun” by Sanuj Sharma, student who worked on Shogun
“This was an excellent learning experience for me and I got to work with people from different countries (UK, Russia, Singapore, Germany) and cultures. I highly recommend students to participate in Google Summer of Code by looking for projects that interest them because having open source experience is highly beneficial, especially for programmers.”


We have wrap-up posts coming out every week so stay tuned for more. If you’re interested in participating in Google Summer of Code 2017, you can find details here.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: GNU Radio

This post is the third installment in our series of wrap-up posts reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

Originally posted on GNU Radio Blog

The summer has come to an end -- along with the Summer of Code for GNU Radio. It was a great season in terms of student participation, and as the students are preparing their last commits, this seems a good time to summarize their efforts.

All students presented their work (either in person, or via poster) at this year’s GNU Radio Conference in Boulder, Colorado.

gr-inspector

With gr-inspector, GNU Radio now has its own out-of-tree module, which serves as a repository for signal analysis algorithms, but also as a collection of fantastic examples. This module was created and worked on by Sebastian Müller, who was funded by Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and Christopher Richardson, who participated as a Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) student funded by the European Space Agency. Sebastian also created a video demonstrating some of the features:


Both Sebastian and Chris have written up their efforts on their own blogs.

PyBOMBS GUI

Ravi Sharan was our other GSoC student, primarily working on a GUI for PyBOMBS, our installation helper tool. Ravi also worked on a bunch of other things, and has summarized his efforts as well.

The PyBOMBS GUI is written in Qt, and is a nice extension to our out-of-tree module ecosystem:


While some developers prefer the comfort of their command line environments, we hope that the PyBOMBS GUI will ease the entry for more new developers. The GUI ties in nicely with CGRAN, and with the correct setup, users can directly launch installation of out-of-tree modules from their browser.

Want to participate? Have ideas?

We will definitely apply for GSoC and SOCIS again next year! If you want to participate as a student, it helps a lot to get involved with the community early on. We also recommend you sign up for the mailing list, and get involved with GNU Radio by using it, reporting and fixing issues, or even publishing your own out-of-tree module. For more ideas, take a look at our summer of code wiki pages.

If you simply have ideas for future projects, those are welcome too! Suggest those on the mailing list, or simply edit the wiki page.

By Martin Braun, Organization Administrator for GNU Radio

Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: NRNB

This post is part of our series of Google Summer of Code wrap-ups, guest posts from students, mentors and organization admins reflecting on Google Summer of Code 2016. Don't miss our first post and follow along for more wrap-up posts and announcements.

We were so excited to be a part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) again after a year off, we pulled together over 50 project ideas and dozens of eager mentors to develop open source code for network biology research. Organized as the National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB), we selected 15 proposals that brought together well-matched students, mentors and project ideas.

All 15 students passed their midterm and final evaluations, resulting in a wide range of (mostly) production-ready code, covering algorithm, UI, importer and converter development for both web and desktop for Cytoscape, cytoscape.js, SBML, SBGN, cBioPortal, Cell Designer, GraphSpace and more.

We are proud of the technical accomplishments and productivity of our students, and we are also proud of the many important aspects of diversity our students represent in the GSoC program, including geographical, gender and academic. Here are some numbers and facts about our 15 students compared to overall GSoC 2016 student stats in parentheses:
  • 9 different countries, including 1 (of 2) from Croatia, 1 (of 3) from Armenia and 2 (of 12) from Turkey
  • 20% female (compared to 12% overall)
  • 67% Computer Science (compared to 78% overall), including PhD students in Biological Oceanography and Medical Biochemistry & Biotechnology, an MS student in Bioinformatics, and a pre-med undergraduate.



Here are some quotes and blogs from our students this year. If you are considering applying as student (or mentor) next year, here is some inspiration:

“I had the opportunity to learn and practice JavaScript with a very interesting project and having a mentor available was great for getting help when needed. The program seemed extremely well run and I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested.”

“Working in an NRNB [GSoC] training program helped to strengthen my resume and introduced me to the idea of combining a career in medicine with computer-based research.”

“I love the friendly atmosphere and the way the team works together. From the very beginning I [felt] well integrated in the group. It was pure fun to work together on the same project and to see how it [has] grown over the time. I [would] recommend everybody try the NRNB training program.”

Some of our student blogs:
  • Hovakim Grabski – "Java support for Deviser, a code generation system for SBML libraries"
  • Kaito Ii – "Interconvertible Layout software for CellDesigner" 
  • Roman Schulte – "Offline SBML validation in the Java-based JSBML library"
  • Mridul Seth – "Import graphs in multiple formats and Cytoscape files into GraphSpace"

By Alex Pico and Kristina Hanspers, NRNB organization admins

Google Summer of Code 2016 wrap-up: HUES Platform

Every year Google Summer of Code pairs university students with mentors to hone their skills while working on open source projects, and every year we like to post wrap-ups from the open source projects about their experience and what students accomplished. Stay tuned for more!



The Holistic Urban Energy Simulation (HUES) platform is an open source platform for facilitating the design and control of renewables-based distributed energy systems. The platform is an initiative of the Urban Energy Systems Laboratory at Empa in Switzerland, in collaboration with our research partners at ETH-Zurich, EPFL, the University of Geneva and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences. As we push towards the second version of the HUES platform, we had help from three bright and enthusiastic students as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Project 1: Real-time wind flow in cities
Air flow pattern around a building configuration (left); link to Rhinoceros/Grasshopper (middle & right)
People in cities are suffering more and more from scorching heat, caused by global warming and bad urban planning. This traps heat inside cities and has led to soaring air conditioning demand, making cities even hotter - a vicious circle!  Clever bioclimatic urban design can mitigate urban heat by facilitating the use of natural ventilation and guiding air streams. However, the simulation of wind flow is a computationally and technically demanding task. There is a need to provide urban planners and architects with a tool able to predict wind flow patterns in real-time to facilitate development of energy efficient and passive designs.

Lukas Bystricky, a student at Florida State University, developed a Fast Fluid Dynamics (FFD) library in C# exactly for this purpose. Lukas’s implementation is based on the  paper by Jos Stam (1999). In contrast to the original implementation, where a cell centred finite difference is used to discretize the equations, Lukas applies a staggered grid finite difference, which is the standard finite difference in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This is done to prevent spurious pressure oscillations near the boundary which can occur in cell centered finite difference for the Navier-Stokes equations. This does not change much in the algorithm or solvers, but makes enforcing the boundary conditions significantly more complicated. So far, Lukas uses a simple Jacobi solver as linear solver, as was the case in Stam's original implementation, but he plans to replace it with more efficient solvers in the future. Also, he is validating his library with typical benchmarks. 

We are now coupling Lukas’s library into our HUES platform, more specifically into the 3D CAD software Rhinoceros and its visual programming platform Grasshopper. The final goal is to have an intuitive real-time visual design tool of wind flow for urban planners and architects. Also, we will use it to couple it to whole year dynamic building energy simulation programs, to better capture microclimatic effects of the urban context in simulating building energy consumption of designs.

Project 2: Modular energy hub modeling framework
A connection between two bus objects in a CopyHub container
Distributed energy system components are modular in nature and interact across multiple scales. As such, there is a need for a modeling framework that can easily construct and configure systems of modular entities (energy demands, sources, converters, storages and network links) across scales. Frederik Banis, a student at the University of Applied Sciences Stuttgart, developed a modular approach to modeling distributed multi-energy systems (energy hubs) in Python, based on the Open Energy System Modelling Framework (Oemof) and Pyomo. 

In the developed framework, energy systems components are specified in a common format allowing for easy duplication and reconfiguring at larger scales. The platform enables easy manipulation of an energy hub grouping multiple components (demand, sources: electricity, natural gas; systems: photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, gas boils, combined heat and power engines, etc.), as well as copying it (from hub1 to hub2) to create a larger interlinked system (district) where multiple energy hubs are connected. This hierarchical nested structure can be repeated as needed, and detailed results about the energy supply of each technology or energy stream can be analyzed in the form of different plots for each system or sub-system.

Project 3: Open source energy simulation database

The HUES platform includes a growing array of datasets describing the technical and economic characteristics of distributed energy technologies.  Currently, this data is stored in separate modules using different data structures and file formats, making it difficult to explore holistically and query systematically. To address this, GSoC student Khushboo Mandlecha has developed an open source database to enable the linked exploration, querying and visualization of data in the platform. 

The first part of the project involved the development of server based scripts to automatically extract relevant data from the modules of the existing HUES platform, and write this data to a common database. A standard format for technology component data was developed, enabling users to upload technology data files to be stored in the new database.  The new database has been developed in MongoDB, enabling fast data retrieval and allowing everything to be retrieved in the form of JSON objects. The second part of the project involved the development of a web-based portal for querying, visualizing and downloading data. Once this portal is complete, it will be possible to visualize the contents of the database in different ways, enabling users to get a sense of the distribution of property values and facilitating the identification of outliers.  Ultimately, the database will help researchers and practitioners using the HUES platform to develop models and perform comprehensive analyses of distributed energy systems.

By L. Andrew Bollinger, Julien Marquant and Christoph Waibel; Urban Energy Systems Laboratory, Empa, Switzerland