In February the roughly two months long Google Code-In (GCI) period came to an end. See the results of all participating organizations at the GCI site. As always, it’s been a strenuous time for students and mentors alike. Of course, it was a very productive one, too.
For the sixth time Google’s Code-In program attracts students of the ages 13 to 17 from all over the world to work with open source projects. Haiku is once again proud to take part and is one of 14 mentor organizations that will supply tasks and guidance. The tasks range from coding and documentation to quality assurance and research. Each task is relatively small and should be accomplished in 3 to 6 hours.
The Haiku, Inc. board of directors has the pleasure of announcing several new members to help support the project.
What is Haiku, Inc.?Haiku, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the Haiku Project and the development of Haiku® (the "Software"). Haiku, Inc. does not have any technical decision making power within the Haiku project at large. The current board of directors: Axel Dörfler (axeld) Rene Gollent (DeadYak) Ryan Leavengood (leavengood) Urias McCullough (umccullough) Alexander von Gluck IV (kallisti5) Sadly, Bruno Albuquerque (BGA, Vice President) and Matthew Madia (mmadia, Secretary) have decided to step down from their positions on the board.
Development team of proprietary PVS-Studio C/C++ static analyzer presents their report on the source code of Haiku project in the article, which contains the review of the most suspicious code fragments they discovered.
While the Haiku developers are already using Coverity to identify some problems (mostly security related), PVS-Studio also detects code written in unusual ways or with possibly unexpected behavior. This means it can detect some functional issues, rather than just security problems.
The Haiku project is participating again in this year's "Semester of Code" (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google's GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.
This is the second installment of "SoC", the objective is still the same:
Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project.
Google has now announced the 24 winners for Google Code-In 2014, with Josef Gajdusek and Puck Meerburg being the two winners from Haiku. This is Puck’s second time winning for Haiku. This year we got to pick our top 5 out of the top 10 students who completed that most tasks for Haiku. Augustin Cavalier was selected as our backup winner, and Markus Himmel and Chirayu Desai were selected as finalist. Chirayu was a GCI 2013 winner with RTEMS, and made the jump to Haiku when RTEMS took this year off from GCI.
This was the fifth year of Google’s Code-In, and the fifth for Haiku. This year we had 6 students who completed 20 or more tasks, one more than in 2013. We had 36 students who completed three or more tasks and qualified for a Google Code-In T-Shirt, and 53 students who completed two or more tasks. This was the first year of having beginner tasks, aimed at lowering the bar to get more new students introduced into open source. Haiku had 149 total students complete at least one task, many of those were for the beginner tasks. We had 164 beginner tasks completed, which was mostly just to introduce students to booting and using Haiku. Other beginner tasks were to compile Haiku or to install and use Haikuporter to build a package from a recipe file. In total students completed a staggering 435 tasks this time for Haiku.
The Haiku project was once again chosen as a mentor organization for this year’s Google Code-In. The little brother of the Summer of Code is targeting younger students - 13 to 17 years old - and consists of many small tasks that are suitable for that age group. Under the lead of Scott McCreary, over a dozen Haiku mentors have entered roughly 400 tasks into Haiku’s GCI page, mostly about creating or fixing haikuporter recipes to package applications and small C++ coding tasks.
The Haiku project is participating in this year’s “Semester of Code” (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google’s GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.
Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project. For Haiku, besides potentially extending its feature set, it’s another opportunity to spark the interest of new, eager developers with a chance to gain future regular contributors.
I have interviewed Paweł Dziepak during my private conversation with him, on polish Haiku IRC channel (#haiku-pl, Freenode). We talked for two nights, on 28 and 29 of April 2014. Paweł is known to the community as pdziepak, I am Premislaus. There are many great people involved with Haiku Project, everyone is worth interviewing - I will try to do that in the future (Ingo, Axel, Stephan, beware!). Why pdziepak this time? The big role in the decision played ease of communication, since we are the same nationality, we talk pretty often with each other on IRC channel. Besides, he is an excellent programmer, engineer with vision! Despite his young age, he doesn't do mobile apps, his field of interest are kernel architectures. Unfortunately, he didn't have current photo and he said no when I proposed him to take a stylish one, either selfie or in an elevator.
We had deep and sincere conversation about Haiku Project and Community condition. I also asked him about Open Source movement in general. The part of that I present to you below:
