Hi,
I am sure most of us know about the annual event Google Summer
Of Code. Like past years The KDE Project participated this year even.
Actually I had posted about the event when it was kicked off this
year.
Anyways, results were declared sometime back and KDE got some
40[1] [2] slots from Google. But for me the bigger and happier news is
that a lot of Indians participated this year and quite a few them
submitted good proposals. There were 216 eligible proposals in all
that were submitted to The KDE Project.
And the news that is even more happier and bigger is that one
of the chosen candidates is from our ``Amchi Mumbai" even - Sharan
Rao. Some of us surely must have seen him / met him at LUG meets or
otherwise. Sharan has been an occasional contributor to K3B since last
year. Sharan's proposal about Umbrello was happily selected by mentors
- I say this because I was present at the meeting and I noticed how
proposals were judged strictly by core KDE devs. I think, I have
mentioned before how being a ``actual" contributor helps in such cases
because they already have seen your code. And more importantly, a good
proposal does it job really well. Sharan's proposal was really good,
more importantly something he thought all by himself and was
completely out of the box and mentors didnot even put forth that in
the stock ideas. All he did was found a cool application and found
what it was lacking and made a good proposal around it.
To be fair to other candidates, I must admit most of the 40
accepted proposals were just like that of Sharan. And all such
proposals just passed with flying colours even if there was a
discussion/debate on pros and cons of the proposals. If there were
only disputes, it was due to certain conflicting proposals or
duplicate proposals for the same idea, in which case the most suitable
candidate was selected which ofcourse was measured by a scale called
as - "who show most enthusiasm and maybe has submitted most patches or
proposal was very very strong". It was taken care that proposal was
worth atleast 30+ hours per week of work and was even informed to
student if he had other ideas. Anything less and the candidate was
questioned. I was sort of happy and pleasantly surprised watching
mentors calling a spade a spade or some such metaphor. And since I
have spoken to personally ( or heard about ) quite a few candidates
this year, the common thing was their enthusiasm and willingness - be
it Mike Authur, Marcus Hanwell or Sharan or anybody else.
Anirudh Ramesh (based in Singapore) and Piyush Verma (Delhi
based) are the other Indians in the list. Good luck to you both. Do
well. Also heartiest congratulaltions to other members of the list who
have been selected as well for other projects. Good wishes to all of
you.
Sharan, dude you rock! Congratulations and loads of good
wishes. And one guy whom I really need to thank is our beloved admin -
Anurag - who was instrumental in helping me get introduced to ( and
meet ) Sharan ( - my favourite twit, is what I like to call him )
sometime Feb '06 or so. He has done really well for himself and
learnt a lot without any other expectations and more importantly has
contributed some lines of code to Free Software and I am sure he will
do much much more.
[1] http://dot.kde.org/1176336589/
[2] http://code.google.com/soc/kde/about.html
Cheers!
Pradeepto
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