Jakoblog ...home of jpetso

As of half a day ago, Drupal's accepted student projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009 have been announced (and of course, also for the other participating organisations). We selected 18 wicked students with intriguing project proposals, and had a hard time sorting out which ones to take because the number of promising proposals was pretty high this time for Drupal. We still should be able to provide motivated students with mentoring even if they didn't make it to the final list, assuming Google's prize money was not the primary motivation to apply for SoC.

In addition to the official Drupal list, I also noticed a Drupal-related project hosted by Creative Commons. Also, former Drupal SoC alumni Allister Beharry (who worked on DAST in 2007) is now showing up with a project for upstream PHP. Other favorites of mine include the entirety of KDE and X.org projects, as well as my buddy klausi getting accepted for a Drupal/Rules project.

The coolest thing for me personally, though, is the selection of not one but an thrilling number of two awesome projects related to Version Control API: Marco Antonio Villegas Vega (a.k.a. marvil07) will work on internal API improvements and other stuff like SSH key authentication, while Daniel Hackney (a.k.a. chrono325) takes care of better VCS support and Rules integration. Both want to help with the transition of Drupal core to a distributed version control system such as Git, and will be mentored by Tony Narlock (skiquel), Sam Boyer (sdboyer) and of course me. With a little luck, we should be able to avoid the epic failure of last year's project and push Version Control API to the next level.

And of course, pushing it onto drupal.org is still on the plate and will be the first thing for me to work on after I finally submit my thesis in mid May.