Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit 2008 - Day 0

12 Nov 2008

Day 0 - 2008/10/24

In my previous blogpost I described the project I mentored during this year’s Google Summer of Code event. At the end of October I was invited into Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for Mentors Summit. Here you can find my remarks.

arrived at the Wild Palms Hotel at around 3pm and took a short nap
Google planned a dinner for us at Amarin Thai restaurant, left the hotel around quarter to six
used VTA public bus transport to get there; turned out to be pretty adventurous: one had to request the stop and the stops were not announced; fortunately had a map software in my cellphone so I was able to track my position by looking out of the window and advancing cursor in my mobile map :)
arrived to the restaurant; not so many people yet, soon started to change …
met Leslie Hawthorn (the official geek herder :)) for the first time
sat at the table with Earl Miles and his wife from Drupal, David Wollner from BZFlag and Joel Sherrill from RTEMS project
talking about our projects; served with various Thai dishes, some of them were very exotic
after an hour or so we headed to the Tied House
some snacks and free beer at the Tied House, heeey! :)
American beer is not what I’m used to, too thick for me :(
went to two tall guys: Matt Handley from Adium and Werner Guttmann mentoring Castor
when talking about Czech Republic, Ondrej Certik from Python Software Foundation appeared too
heard two people talking about openSUSE Build Service, interested who could it be …
mystery solved: Oleksandr Moskalenko from the Scribus team and Lance Albertson from Oregon State University - Scribus is one of the first larger projects that started to build their own packages using Build Service, Lance was mentoring a project which aimed to create packages for various distributions using Gentoo ebuilds
noted that the dependencies of the packages are the a big problem, Lance had to admit that I’m right; they actually use database of packages and their dependencies for each distribution, must be huge and hard to maintain!
there are two Gentoo mentors here! Donnie Berkholz and Alec Warner
short talk with Johannes Schmid from GNOME about Mono
approached by Stefan Reinauer from coreboot; learned that he used to work for SUSE once, in the Arch team; he decided to start his own business with LinuxBIOS (or coreboot, like it is called nowadays)
short talk with guys from OSSIM project (Pablo Rincón Crespo and Juan Manuel Lorenzo)
headed back to the hotel with Brooks Davis from FreeBSD and his wife
finally found out who my roommate is! it’s David Bruce from Tux4Kids project
we talked a little bit about his work, promised to show him openSUSE Build Service the other day
I fell into bed exhausted, but really looking forward for the actual summit and its sessions

Days 1 and 2 will appear tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. I promise to post some photos too :)