Last week I attended to Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Googleplex, Mountain View. It was definitely one of the best time I had in recent years.

First of all, thanks to Leslie, Ellen, Cat, Chris DiBona and Google Open Source program office and everyone who made this happen (I should also thank to Sam Lantinga (writer of SDL) who let me to use his travel stipend.)

My adventure started at Los Angeles; thanks to my Google Summer of Code t-shirt, I met with Fridrich (from Go OpenOffice project) at Los Angeles and we made all way to Sunnyvale from San Francisco with Thorsten (also from Go-OO). After travelling for 20 hours, I went to the opening party at Wild Palms on Friday. It was really nice to see some familiar faces from last year’s summit; Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), Sam Lantinga (SDL), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL), Jacob Appelbaum (Tor), Gary (Pidgin), Marty (Etherboot) and many others that I cannot name now.

Women in Open Source session (bottom + left)

On Saturday, the sessions got started and everybody who wanted to lead a session wrote their ideas and proposed them for vote: the more people add badges to your session, the bigger conference room you get. I proposed a session; Reversing the Trend: Women in Open Source and hopefully, there was quite a lot interest for the session and I found the chance to lead it at the biggest conference room, Tunis. There were really interesting ideas and experiences about the topic and we continued the session on Sunday, too. (I will write about the session and share the notes and thoughts in another blog post, soon.)

Photo by John ‘Warthog9′ Hawley.

When I got tired of participating to technical sessions, I spent some time at Casablanca session :) Casablanca is a room with full of Play-dohs, toys and this kind of things (as appears in the picture above) and it’s for discussing things while playing with toys =)

Also I should mention Sam’s Solar System session, which we discussed solar system and astronomy applications under Linux and examined some stars and build a solar system with play-dohs for Sam’s daughter =)

During the summit I had the chance to meet with awesome people (I wish I could mention all of them, but thanks to jet-lag!), Ryan and Lionel (GNOME \m/), Alistair and Erik (WorldForge), Jason (Limesurvey), Lydia and Leo (KDE), Jon, Josh and his wonderful wife Erin (Inkscape) and Nicolas (GIMP) and many others.

After two days of hacking, summit ended on Sunday and we took the traditional group photo together:

Photo by John ‘Warthog9′ Hawley.

I really appreciate to Leslie and other Googlers who made me to have that awesome time.

Also thanks to everyone who participated to write Google Summer of Code Mentoring Guide, so we can read the fraking manual instead of asking the same questions to Leslie. ;)

I also had awesome time after the summit with Lionel, Ryan and Jason. Maybe I can write about that trip later, but here’s our awesome photo with Android and its releases: cupcake, donut and eclair. \m/

Finally, I returned to hometown after a painful roadmap (San Jose -> Denver -> Frankfurt -> Istanbul). But the only thing that makes those hours quickly spendable is the people I met –hopefully I can always find some interesting people to talk with :)

This time, at my last transit flight (after 4 + 9 hours on air) I met with two men, it was really funny. In fact I just asked if they want a dark Twix or not, but one of them told me he’s just too tired to eat. So I wondered if they’re from CA, too.. Then we started to talk. After a while, I realized one of them was wearing a Microsoft t-shirt :)

- Uhmm.., you’re working for Microsoft?
+ Yes, we are.
- Oh, I’ve just attended to a summit in Google. Actually.. I am working for a Linux distribution.

Then we started to laugh.. and some kind of funny fan stuff. Then it went like that:

+ So what are you doing exactly?
- I am from the security team, I am tracking vulnerabilities and fixing them. And you?
(they started to laugh, and I was trying to figure out why :))
- Hey, what’s wrong? :)
+ We’re from Microsoft’s security team!

I think it was a really nice conjunction, think about that: you find somebody to talk -> you’re colleagues -> and you’re working in the same specific area + they are from a very different point of view.. So we talked about security, open source, Microsoft & Novell and so on. And Android! Damn, despite unlocking it successfuly, I still can’t sign in my Google account.. They were really nice people and shared their knowledge about unlocking phones :) So I realized I have some extra things to do rather than just network unlocking.

And at last.. the funniest part of our conversation:

+ So why are you working for open source anyway?
- For freedom! :)

PS: I spent my Halloween in California’s Great America and had a lot of fun. :) Picturezz ->