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/

photo by Austin Ziegler

I was at Google Mentor Summit this weekend. It was at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was really amazing to meet with other FOSS developers.

It took 22 hours to arrive CA but hopefully I was strong enough to directy go to the welcome party. :)

First of all, I’d like to thank Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and any other Googlers who participated to organize such a wonderful summit. I really had a great time.

During the summit, I attended several sessions including Android related ones (which made me to buy a TMobile G1 yesterday!) and Distro Leader’s summit that Donnie (from Gentoo) proposed (Karsten Wade from Fedora, Joe Brockmeier from OpenSuse, Steve McIntyre from Debian showed up) and we talked about how to get introduced more people with Linux. And of course, Sam’s Open Souce Game Development session was one of the greatest ones.


pic. from open source security session

I also led a session called Open Souce Security. It took much more time than I thought (90 minutes instead of 30′). A lot of participants from various level of security showed up– Google Network Security Team Leader, Eugene Teo from Redhat Security Team, developers from Tor project (you can remember Jacob Appelbaum from his Cold Boot Attack Research) and so on. At first minutes, I got really excited because there were a lot of security experts who have much more knowledge and experience than me. :) But the session went quite good and we mostly discussed about tracking vulnerabilities, disclosing security flaws, patches to OSS projects that possibly have security vulnerabilities and criterions of accepting them, and GSoC students’ secure coding.

I’d like to thank some of my friends that I met at the event -in order of appearance :)

* Eugene Teo from Redhat Kernel Security Team. I knew and respect him from OSS security society- it was really nice to meet and talk about security with him.

* Donnie Berkholz from Gentoo. He’s currently Gentoo council member and maintains X.org–which I think is a quite hard job :)

* Sam Lantinga, lead software engineer and leader of the group of gameplay programmers on World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertaintment. *cool* He’s also the creator of fabulous library, SDL. He became one of my closest friends during these two days. I’m really so lucky to meet with him. :)

* Nils Kneuper and Mark de Wever from Wesnoth. We used to know each other with Nils but I totaly forgot that he’ll attend to this event. But thanks God, we met at lunch by chance! :) Mark is also a cool guy from Wesnoth and *i think* he had a great time while watching me when I was drinking *natural* Green Tea (it was the worst thing i’ve ever drunk. ahh.).

* Austin Ziegler, from Ruby Central. He is a cool photographer and ruby person and I am looking forward to see his group girl photos.

* Selena Deckelmann, from PostgreSQL. I always glad to meet with other women in computing. I am looking forward to participate in a WiC project with her.

* Mike Melanson, Justin Ruggles, Reimar Döffinger from ffmpeg team. They were really funny people and we had a great time while Mike was talking about the times that Ismail‘s complainings on Turkish support :)

* Alisson Yagi Costa, from Umit. We went to San Francisco and Santa Cruz with him and his words to describe me were quite remarkable :“you’re not normal, but you’re not strange” :)

Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!

PS#1: There are some photos (the giant anroid, too!) on my Flickr set: Mentor summit, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Stanford, Palo Alto.

PS#2: To Turkish readers: I merged my Turkish blog (and RSS’ also) with this blog address, so from now on all my entries will be in English. Thanks! :)