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:
As most of our visitors have probably already heard in the last few days - one of the largest security disasters I can recall in modern internet history was discovered, and dubbed “Heartbleed”.
Wow. Thanks to our donors' generousity, Adrien is able to continue for a seventh month of improving WebPositive, WebKit and its related techologies. $2145 has been raised this past month! This is spot on with the number mentioned in last month's contract announcement article.
If you did not hear, Adrien has started working on HTML5 Audio/Video support, specifically the audio portion. As usual, he is publishing weekly progress reports on his blog. Periodically, new builds of WebKit and WebPositive are merged into the nightly images.
Within these past 4 weeks, over $1,200 USD and &EUR;900 EUR have been raised! Thanks directly to this fundraising, Adrien is now able to be funded through the month of March. With the addition of the newest monthly subscribers, we reached a milestone and now raise over $1,000 per month through recurring monthly donations!
Pawel's contract has concluded with his work being merged into Haiku's master repository. Hopefully within the next few days, he will be able to post another blog post to summarize the improvements.
Now the even better news -- the recent donations from everyone has made it possible for Adrien to continue for another month! If another $1200 USD is raised by the end of this month, then there will definitely be enough funds to keep him coding through March (At the moment, our reserves would drop to below $800 USD, which is something we try to avoid.)
Google has now announced the 20 winners for Google Code-In 2013, with Freeman Lou and Puck Meerburg being the two winners from Haiku.
This was the fourth year of Google's Code-In, and the fourth for Haiku. This contest came at a good point this year for Haiku as the package management merge happened just a few weeks prior to the start of the contest and thus gave us plenty of ideas for tasks. Nearly half of our tasks were somehow related to writing recipes for packages to be built into .hpkg files. We also opened up the coverity scan results for students to try their hand at fixing some of those issues for the first time. Along with these tasks there were several others which ranged from fixing specific bugs from Haiku's trac tickets, to writing new programs such as a blogging program and a spider solitaire game, and even a few for the artistic type students who created a new flyer and some new icons.
This may be the final chapter of contract extensions, as the available funds will be plummeting to less than $1500 USD.
