Jakoblog ...home of jpetso

Finally a posting in English again :D

So I've applied for the Google Summer of Code (SoC) once more, but unlike last year when I did a project for KDE, I'll work on Drupal this year. Unlike last year, I've got a pretty website where I can put my proposal, so not only its content but also its appearance grew pretty impressive this time. Very much like last year however, it's ridiculously hard to explain its goals to someone who doesn't know software developement inside out.

You can have a look at it nevertheless, it's still lying around on this website, and the Drupal people obviously like it as much as I do, which means I will work on this project from the end of May to the mid of August, paid by Google. I assume they'll again send out nice gimmicks, a T-shirt, and a certificate.

Drupal will, it seems, exercise more of a supervising role than was the case with KDE where I was pretty much free to report and communicate how I liked to. For the Summer of Code, Drupal tells its accepted students to blog about their project's progress once a week (starting at the official start of the SoC, May 28th) and assigns not only one but two mentors for guiding the students. I can imagine this strategy actually raises the students' chances to succeed and become part of the greater Drupal community while working on their projects. Pretty clever, and better organized than most of the other mentor organizations.

I'm looking forward to working together with Andy Kirkham (AjK^) and Derek Wright (dww) as my mentors, and incorporating previous findings from Adam Light (aclight) (who also provided me with feedback for my project proposal) and Gavin Mogan (halkeye), both of which already worked on related projects. The only thing that I fear is June, because this will really be the time when everything has to be delivered at once.

In other news, I now got a ticket and a reservation for this year's aKademy (the annual KDE conference) which takes place in Glasgow from June 29th to July 7th, and my employer Pro.Karriere graciously sponsored the flight to DrupalCon from the 19th to 22nd of September, for all people in our development team. I think that's great, and I'm anxious to experience how a non-KDE conference looks like :D