Google Open Source Blog

Google Summer of Code Wrap up: Processing

Friday, February 6, 2015

Today’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) wrap up comes from Daniel Shiffman at the Processing Foundation, the organization responsible for the Processing programming language used in many visual arts applications.

Processing is a programming language and development environment specifically tailored to the needs of visual thinkers and artists. Tens of thousands of people use Processing (often called “p5” for short) for design, performance, animation, cinema, and more. It’s also used in several computer science curriculums for its appeal to visually-oriented learners.

We participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the fourth time in 2014. The students working with us completed eleven projects, many of which are in active use by the Processing community while others will be part of the upcoming Processing 3.0 release. We’ll highlight just a few of these projects below, but we’re grateful to all the students who took part in GSoC with us.

PDE X for Processing 3.0 (Manindra Moharana)

PDE X is a Processing mode that introduces advanced IDE features like code completion, refactoring, live error checking, debugger and more. Manindra helped bring PDE X to a stable state, allowing it to become the default editor in Processing 3.0. Over 30 bugs were fixed as part of this effort. Manindra also added a few new features, including precise error highlighting using the Wagner-Fischer algorithm, manual control over code completion using Ctrl+Space, and a tab outline popup window.

p5.sound addon for p5.js (Jason Sigal)

Jason created the p5.sound addon for the p5.js library to bring the Processing approach to Web Audio. Its functionality includes audio input, playback, manipulation, effects, recording, analysis, and synthesis. Jason also wrote methods for file input / output and ported Processing's Table / TableRow classes to p5.js.

Contributions Manager for the PDE (Joel Moniz)

The Contributions Manager lets users easily install, remove, and update community-developed extensions from within the PDE (Processing Development Environment). Joel’s work this summer introduced new features to the Contributions Manager, such as the addition, removal and update of Tools and Modes without a restart, a new "examples-package"-type contribution, and highlighting contributions.

Sound for Processing 3.0 (Wilm Thoben)

Wilm began work on a lightweight sound library for Processing in late 2013 and improved on it during GSoC 2014 by adding new features, fixing bugs, and introducing cross-platform support. Sound is built on top of methcla, a C++ sound engine with native bindings for low latency support. Sound provides a collection of sound-synthesis objects, analyzers and effects.

by Daniel Shiffman, Processing Foundation

Orgs Get Ready: Preparing for GSoC 2015 with Freifunk

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

We’re getting ready for Google Summer of Code 2015 and the first step is selecting the mentoring organizations that will take part. Organization applications will open next week on Feb 9th, so we encourage you to think about how your open source project could benefit from participation. Today, we welcome GSoC veteran Federico Capoano from Freifunk to share his enthusiasm with other orgs.

It may be the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere, but we at Freifunk are already fired up about the summer. Organization applications for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015 will open soon, and we’ve been urging other open source projects to take part. We’ve participated in GSoC six times, but last year left us with a new level of passion and enthusiasm for the FOSS movement.

Freifunk is a decentralized organization which is building community networks in Germany. Community networks bring a FOSS-inspired approach to the computing networks we use every day: an open network built, owned and managed by private citizens who decide how they use it and which services to run on it. Our community has been participating in GSoC with other communities like Guifi (Catalunya and Spain), Ninux (Italy), and Wlan Slovenia (Slovenia). Together we are making great strides toward the realization of our dream networks.

In GSoC 2014, we had eight successful projects completed by students and mentors from many different parts of the world: Europe, South America and Asia. We don't think about it so often since our contributors are so busy and concentrated on their own projects, but I think it’s amazing that we had volunteers from all over the globe collaborating on open source software applied to open networks!

After the summer, I had the opportunity to attend the GSoC 2014 Tenth Year Reunion which was an incredible experience. I met my Freifunk friends and so many other talented and skilled people working in the FOSS field with many famous organizations from all over the world! Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of excitement and enthusiasm!

We had a chance to meet the people of Google Open Source (Chris DiBona, Carol Smith, Cat Allman and Stephanie Taylor) and had the honour of meeting Linus Torvalds, Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig and Dirk Hohndel. Their talks at the event were incredibly inspiring and encouraging. The unconference sessions were very educational and we had an opportunity to discuss improving our GSoC experiences and even the program itself.

It’s difficult for me to describe the whole Reunion experience in words alone, but I can tell you something that might be valuable for you too: this experience ENFLAMED me. If there is something vital to the FOSS movement, it’s enthusiasm. Without enthusiasm and excitement, we wouldn't go anywhere. Coming home to Europe afterward, we brought all that excitement from our community back with us.

Since then, we’ve been conveying our experience to our friends and motivating people to start new exciting projects and prepare for 2015. I personally talked about GSoC and the #reunion14 at:

Ninux.org meetups and mailing lists
Roma JS (Javascript devs meetup in Rome)
PyRoma (Python devs meetup in Rome)
Cineca, an IT consortium for universities that also works with FOSS (the place where I work)
Fablab Roma Makers

We’ll also be attending several events this year if you’d like to meet up with us: FOSSASIA (Singapore, March 2015), Wireless Community Weekend (Germany, May 2015), OpenTech Summit (Germany, May 2015), Wireless Battle of the Mesh v8 (Slovenia, August 2015), and Chaos Communication Camp (Germany, August 2015).

Similarly, my German friends have talked and written a lot about our last GSoC experience in the different Freifunk meetups, mailing lists, and the main Freifunk blog.

I would like to use this opportunity to encourage everyone in the FOSS community to participate in Google Summer of Code in 2015 because we all need enthusiasm and excitement in our communities. What are you waiting for? Participate and make the best out of it, you won't regret it.

by Federico Capoano, Freifunk mentor

Google Code-in 2014: Welcome to the Winners Circle

Monday, February 2, 2015

The time has finally come to announce the Google Code-in 2014 Finalists and Grand Prize Winners. With 658 students completing a whopping 3,236 tasks in the seven week open source contest, this was the largest and most exciting contest to date. Students wrote code, added features to software, fixed bugs, created documentation, designed logos, and found fun new ways to introduce other students to open source software development. The quality of the work the teens submitted was as inspiring as it was impressive.

A big congratulations to all of the students who participated in this year’s contest! We hope you enjoyed learning more about the open source organizations you worked with and will continue contributing to open source in the years to come.

Mentors and Organization Administrators from each of the 12 organizations that students worked with evaluated the comprehensive body of work of the ten students who completed the most tasks with their organization. They had a very difficult time choosing only 2 Grand Prize Winners and 3 Finalists for their organizations.

The 24 Grand Prize Winners are listed below alphabetically by first name with their home country and the organization they worked with during the Google Code-in 2014 contest.

Aleksandar Ivanov, Bulgaria - Mifos Initiative

Anurag Sharma, India - Sahana Software Foundation

Chaitya Shah, United States - OpenMRS

Danny Wu, Australia - Wikimedia Foundation

Dariel Kremov, Bulgaria - Copyleft Games Group

Getulio Sanchez, Paraguay - Drupal

Ignacio Rodríguez, Uruguay - Sugar Labs

Ilya Kowalewski, Ukraine - KDE

Josef Gajdůšek, Czech Republic - Haiku

Marc Tannous, Romania - BRL-CAD

Mariusz Obajtek, Poland - Mifos Initiative

Mateusz Maćkowski, Poland - Wikimedia Foundation

Michal Proszek, Poland - Copyleft Games Group

Mikhail Ivchenko, Russian Federation - KDE

Namanyay Goel, India - FOSSASIA

Parker Erway, United States - OpenMRS

Peter Amidon, United States - BRL-CAD

Puck Meerburg, Netherlands - Haiku

Sam Parkinson, Australia - Sugar Labs

Samarjeet Singh, India - FOSSASIA

Samsruti Dash, India - Sahana Software Foundation

Stanislav Kryvenko, Ukraine - Apertium

Sushain Cherivirala, United States - Apertium

Tasya Rukmana, Indonesia - Drupal

The 24 Grand Prize Winners will be flown to Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters along with a parent or guardian in early June for a four night stay. Students will talk with Google engineers, take part in an awards ceremony, enjoy time exploring San Francisco and make new friends also interested in technology and open source. One mentor from each organization will also join in the fun of the grand prize trip, giving both students and mentors the opportunity to meet in person and exchange ideas on open source development.

The 36 Finalists for Google Code-in 2014 are listed below. The Finalists will all be receiving a Google Code-in hooded sweatshirt along with their Google Code-in t-shirt and certificate.

Apertium	BRL-CAD	Copyleft Games
Joonas Kylmala	Aditya Gulati	Jakub Kuleszewicz
Olexiy Savenkov	Sidorenko Nikolay	Samuel Kim
Vignesh Varadarajan	Yash Mockoul	Tobias Shapinsky
Drupal	FOSSASIA	Haiku
Akshay Kalose	Alvis Wong	Augustin Cavalier
Ilkin Musaev	Amr Ramadan	Chirayu Desai
Mark Klein	Tymon Radzik	Markus Himmel
KDE	Mifos Initiative	OpenMRS
Daniel Pastushchak	Kevin Kuo	Evgeny Shulgin
Nuno Hultberg	Mohammed Nafees	Imran Tatriev
Sergey Popov	Sanjay Ravindra	Ungku Zoe Anysa Faiz
Sahana	Sugar Labs	Wikimedia
David Greydanus	Cristian Garcia	Evan McIntire
Sai Vineet	Daksh Shah	Geoffrey Mon
Vipul Sharma	Jae Eun Park	Pranav Kumar

A huge thanks to all of the students, mentors, and organization administrators that made Google Code-in 2014 amazing! And a big thank you to the teachers, parents and friends that helped encourage students to participate in the contest.

We will have more posts in the coming weeks with statistics about Google Code-in 2014 as well as writeups from this year’s Grand Prize Winners.

Great job everyone!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager