Summer of Code Meetup at Google San Francisco

I’m in San Francisco for the month of June getting ramped up at my new job with Twilio and it just so happend that Google hosted a Summer of Code Meetup at their office just a few blocks down the road.

I joined a group of about a dozen others, including Carol Smith and Cat Allman from Google’s Open Source Programs Office. There were GSoCers from all over California, including two exchange students and one who came all the way from Guadalajara, Mexico.

We started the event off just after 3PM with introductions and some background info on the various projects for GSoC 2010. There was one other GSoC alum from 2008, João Antunes, who worked on a file transfer protocol for SIP Communicator.

After João shared his experiences and advice I talked a bit about my experience working on a Summer of Code project while I was living in China. In addition I gave three lightning talks on projects I’m working on after GSoC.

I started with an interactive demo of Twilio followed by a Q&A on the technology. There were a lot of great questions and there seemed to be a very high level of interest. After I finished up with Twilio, I shared an update on Mozilla’s Drumbeat initiative which naturally segued into a discussion on P2PU and the Open Web Craft project.

After my presentation, a few guys from Scripped gave advice on communication and it’s importance in project management.

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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/4689780128/in/set-72157624248710936/"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4016/4689780128_548923f4ff.jpg" alt="Slide in Google's SF Office"</a />

Carol was super nice and gave us a tour around the office. We got some free food from the micro-kitchen and rode the Google Slide.

We rounded out the day with a trip to a pub on the waterfront overlooking the Bay Bridge. Overall, it was a pretty sweet day.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/johndbritton/sets/72157624248710936/">Flickr Set</a>

<strong>UPDATE: Guest <a href="http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-summer-of-code-2010-san.html">post</a> on Google Open Source Blog.</strong>