Horay! I participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code and I’ll be involvled in PulseAudio community to help enhance the logging and testing facilities.
Let me first introduce what’s GSoC (Google Summer of Code), it’s a project hosted by Google every year to motivate students to be engaged in open source projects. Students will have a meaningful summer and be paid for their hard coding work. 🙂
Then PulseAudio project. If you’re using a modern Linux desktop, then chances are that you’re already using this software. It’s the component which helps to mix all the sounds from other applications and then output them into your speakers or headphones.
Finally me 🙂 I’m a student from East China Normal University. Technically speaking, I’m not majoring in computer science, nor anything related to it. But I’m inspired by my friends and now I’m happy to say that I could CODE! This is the coolest skill, that is, I can make almost anything into reality.
I’m so lucky to be chosen into PulseAudio community. I’d love to thanks all the developers in this community. My mentor Arun, and the maintainer Colin, and Tanu even had a full code review on my proof of concept of circular log buffering patch!
Well, let me share some tips how you would be better selected in GSoC.
First, start early! Early birds catches the worms. Each year’s schedule is quite similar, find out last year’s accepted projects and see which one interests you most. This whole list is quite long, so start early to find out your interests!
Second, be involved in the community. Once you’ve found one project, the first thing you should do is to be invovled in the community. Being involved has different meanings, the first step is of course to download the software and have a try, be a user! And then be a tester. Then, you can find out from its website to see how to setup your developement environment. Sign up for the mailing list, or even hang out in its IRC channel.
Third, do your homework. Now it comes the hard part. 🙂 After some tests and uses, you may wonder, “hey, this could be enhanced!” or “I would this feature in another way!”. That’s a good sign, this means you have your own opinion on what the project should be shaped. Then start small and write a simple demo to show you are ABLE to do this project. In my application, I spent about one week to write the circular log buffer demo and it turns out to be useful of getting myself faimilar with its internals.
Now here are some words about this blog. According to the advice from Colin, I’m setting this blog up to mainly track my status of this summer project. However, possibly this blog would have more technically contents later on with more engagement in open source community. It’s a good start, isn’t it? 😀
zhengrong 