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I am working on the application for The Perl Foundation and Parrot
Foundation to participate in Google Summer of Code 2010. GSoC is a
program where Google funds eligible students to hack on open source
projects for a summer. It is a great opportunity for the students and
the communities that mentor them. You also may be interested in this
summary of our involvement last year . Our application will be
submitted by the end of this week.

Please join us in getting prepared for this year. There is a page for
possible mentors to volunteer as well as a page for 

The first day of OpenSourceBridge was amazing and we finished it off by having a Bird of Feather session for people involved and/or interested in Google Summer of Code.

I know that it was very helpful to hear and talk about how the current GSoC is going with my fellow organization admins, mentors and students. Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and Leslie Hawthorn contributed a lot of knowledge and experience about how to deal with things when they go pear-shaped, and I even met an organization and mentor that are my neighbors! Some of the great ideas that came out of this were that first-year organizations would be greatly helped by having a "buddy" organization that has been involved in GSoC before, so that a brand-new organization admin can have a friendly ear to bend when they need help. I mentioned this because I usually bend Bart Massey's ear when I need some GSoC guidance, and I thought that other first-year admins could also greatly benefit from something like this.

I was a mentor for the The Perl Foundation last year, with the Math::GSL project and this year I find myself the organization admin as well as a mentor for the Math::Primality project, which implements advanced prime-checking algorithms for Perl 5. It is definitely a big step to go from mentor to admin and meeting up with people in the same situation really helps!

I will definitely be going to OpenSourceBridge next year and hope that we have a GSoC meetup there again.

If all the dates and timelines of Google Summer of Code have you confused, this nice color-coded visualization of each part of the summer may help make it more sense.

Next week is the super-cool-with-extra-awesomesauce conference Open Source Bridge, which is all about being an "open source citizen." ( I recently had to explain to someone that it was not an "Open Sores Conference". Much hilarity ensued) . There will be many open source folk from around to globe, including many GSoC mentors, students and the program manager, Leslie Hawthorn. This prompted me to create a Bird of Feather session for GSoC people. This is for anybody that has every been part of GSoC or is interested in participating in the future. Come on by and hang out!

As always, you can find us in #soc-help on irc.perl.org if you want to get involved.

So much has been going on this summer of code! As a recap, TPF got nine student slots this year, which means we have nine mentors and nine students working on various things this summer. Here is a sample of what has been going on recently.

Pascal Gaudette describes his love for debugging tricky HTTP/1.1 issues in Mojo
and has even added a "featurette."  Devin Austin has been talking about
eviscerating Catalyst::Helper and Daniel Arbelo Arrocha has thoughtfully
detailed the difference between bonding and bondage. My student, Robert Kuo,
has been busy reading the mathematical paper and example C implementation  of
the Strong Lucas Pseudoprime primality test for Math::Primality . While installing Math::GMPz, which we use to access the GNU Multiprecision Library (GMP), he found a small issue which caused some test failures and submitted a bug report.

Math::Primality also very recently gained a working is_prime() method, which
works for arbitrary sized integers, due mostly to Robert Kuo's implementation
of is_strong_lucas_psuedoprime() being finished. Now you can test for prime numbers in Perl without installing Math::Pari! More about this in a separate post!

Ryan Jendoubi is working on a Perl interface for wxWebkit and Hinrik Örn Sigurðsson
is working on the command line utility to read Perl 6 documentation called grok.
Justin Hunter has been hacking on his blogging software so that he can blog about
his work on SQL::Translator. Sometimes it's a vicious cycle...

Back to hacking on some code!

I have been improving the test coverage and portability of Math::GSL and hacking and getting Math::Primality in a state so that my GSoC student can work on it. This involved porting it to use Math::GMPz (thanks Sysiphus!) instead of my fork of Math::BigInt::GMP on github. I have learned the way of "minimization of maintainence." This is again a lesson in not doing thorough enought prior art research before slicing into it with a large, dull chainsaw.

I have noticed an explosion of Perl-related blogs lately, it is great to see many facets of the Perl community in blog and RSS form, instead of only in mailing list posts. Adding more mediums of communication only strengthens ideas and spreads them faster.

Congratulations to the nine students who have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009 with The Perl Foundation! Initially TPF was given ten slots, but a duplicate accepted application was generated from other duplication resolutions (it's not a process that is guaranteed to terminate!). Andriy Kushnarov submitted two great applications to the TYPO3 organization as well as an application to TPF regarding plugins for the November wiki. It was decided to donate the slot to TYPO3, so here is our list of the nine accepted applications:

• Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit
• Student: Ryan Jendoubi
• Mentor: Michael Peters

• A prototype LLVM JIT runcore for Parrot
• Kevin Tew 
• Mentor: Allison Randal
  

• HTTP/1.1 Compliance Testing and User-Agent Development for the Mojo Web Framework
• Pascal Gaudette
• Mentor: Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi

• Implement BPSW algorithm as a Perl 5 CPAN module, Math::Primality with extensive test-suite
• Robert Kuo
• Mentor: Jonathan Leto
  

• Decimal Arithmetic: BigInt, BigNum and BigRat for parrot
• Daniel Arbelo Arrocha
• Mentor: Christoph Otto
  

• Refactoring Catalyst helper modules
• Devin Austin
• Mentor: Kieren Diment
  

• Perl 6 end-user documentation tools
  
• Hinrik Sigurdsson
• Mentor: Carl Masak
  

• SQL::Translator rewrite
• Justin Hunter
• Mentor: Ash Berlin
  

• Multimethods for SMOP
• Paweł Murias
• Mentor: Daniel Ruoso 

We have some very exciting applications for a wide variety of topics this year, ranging from Perl 5 CPAN modules, to Parrot internals and, of course, Perl 6. The students involved this year are poised to make a tremendous impact to the projects they work on. Now that pesky "implementation" phase begins! Not before a bit of community bonding, but I am sure that students will start coding before the actual, no-more-bonding-lets-code date of May 23rd.

Thank you to everyone involved, especially people in #soc-help on irc.perl.org and those on the tpf-gsoc-students list. You rock. Special thanks goes out to Joshua McAdams who made a cool TPF GSoC 2009 YouTube video!

Is it any coincidence that today is one of the hottest days of the year so far in Portland, OR? In any case, this summer of code is heatin' up.

Are you a Perl Monger group that hasn't yet found a student to apply for Google Summer of Code? Now is the time, the deadline is this Friday, 3 April 17:00 UTC/12 Noon PDT! Adding your trials and tribulations to the TPF wiki is still valuable, even if you did not end up finding a student. It is valuable to know which PM groups are trying to do outreach in the community and how other PM groups can help.

• Why Google Summer of Code Should Matter To You

If you are a student, many of the great opportunities that GSoC opens up are described in this video, Code Conversations #3 with Leslie Hawthorn. She goes into many success stories of previous students and talks about how there is room for all skill levels, not just experts. There is also a Youtube video made by Joshua McAdams about The Perl Foundation and Google Summer of Code.

• Deadline

The deadline is this Friday 3 April 2009, 17:00 UTC/12 Noon PDT, so now is the time to submit your application! There is the project ideas page for you to see what there is to hack on and the application template to hammer your ideas into a plan. We have a  google group for students to ask questions and there are always some helpful people in #soc-help on irc.perl.org to ask. For up-to-the minutes status updates, follow me on twitter and/or search for the "#gsoc" tag on your favorite aggregator.

• Project Ideas
  

Some really good ideas that don't have application yet are:

• Work on the Perl 6 Test suite, (really important!)
• Object system (multi method dispatch, object creation, role mixin), introspection
• Regexes/grammars: inheritance, action methods for grammars, structure of Match objects; built-in rules; modifiers.
• built-in types, especially container types (like KeySet, see S02)
• Exceptions, control exceptions, catch-blocks
• Advanced primality testing for Perl, necessary for testing native cryptography
• YAML parser as a PGE grammar wrapped by Perl 6 module
  
• Port Crypt::Random to Rakudo
• Work on IO subsystem in Rakudo
• Add Callgrind output to Parrot
• GSL bindings to Parrot via NCI
• November, a Perl 6 wiki engine
• POE (Perl Object Environment)
  

Students, submit your application now and get feedback from the community on the GSoC webapp, Melange! Now is the best time to get involved in the open source project that you have always dreamed of working on and get paid to do it

I am excited to announce that The Perl Foundation has been officially accepted to Google Summer of Code 2009, (wheels within) wheels have started turning!

Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list  and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto  or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

Those interested in being mentors should sign up here as well as getting on the mailing list . If you are Just Another Perl Hacker that wants to help students decide on what to work on or give them feedback on different project ideas, then please join the student mailing list and dish out some of that knowledge to those in need.

Student Applications are due April 3: 12 Noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. That is approaching quickly, so start joining the fun.

Happy hacking this summer!

I have created a Google doc web-form/spreadsheet to keep track of mentor interest and to have handy when I fill out the GSoC mentor organization application. If you have emailed me expressing interest in being a mentor, please fill out this spiffy web-form so that logistic nightmares can be averted.

Upcoming GSoC dates

• March 9-13  Mentor organization application period
  
• March 18  Mentor organizations announced by Google
• March 23 - April 3 Student application period
  

Yes, that is right, all student applications must be done in a month, so start writing and hacking and Jolly good day!