Maemo @ GSoC 2010: Accepted Projects

Last Monday, Google announced the list of accepted projects for the Summer of Code Program. Like last year, Maemo has got 10 slots. As Valério said in a previous post, we received about 90 submissions this year, which made the task of selecting the best proposals much more difficult. Many thanks to all people involved on the selection process. :)

Enough talk. Here is the list (in no particular order, just copied and pasted the contents of the wiki page):

• Porting Canola to Maemo 5 and beyond
  Student: Andrei Mirestean (andrei1089)
  Mentor: Eduardo Lima (etrunko)


• FaceBrick - a facebook client for Maemo / the N900
  Student: Kamilla Bremeraunet (brik)
  Mentor: Robin Burchell (w00t)


• UPnP Remote Access
  Student: Sunil Kumar Ghai
  Mentor: Zeeshan Ali


• The Tablet of Adventure: a location-based social adventure
  Student: Susanna Huhtanen
  Mentor: Henri Bergius (bergie)


• Extending Shepherd
  Student: Linus Wallgren (ecksun)
  Mentor: Attila Csipa (achipa)


• eBook reader for Maemo 5
  Student: Juhana Jauhiainen
  Mentor: Valerio Valerio (VDVsx)


• Gtk+ Input Method for the Harmattan Input Method UI Framework
  Student: Javier De San Pedro Martin
  Mentor: Mohammad Dhani Anwari


• Transifex mobile
  Student: Lauri Vosandi (v6sa)
  Mentor: Thomas Perl (Thp)


• Optical Page Reader for the N900
  Student: David Jordan
  Mentor: Florian Boor (Florian)


• MeeGo Cloud Storage Integration
  Student: Eli Foley
  Mentor: Yan Li

Congratulations to all accepted students! Some of them already had worked on projects related to Maemo on GSoC last year. In either case would be really cool to post a small introduction about yourself and the project you will work on during the next months. If you have a blog, request it to be syndicated on Planet Maemo.

For those whose projects were not accepted, and still think it is worth to work on it, you are be more than welcome. Although there won't be any assigned mentor, I am sure you can find help on the mailing lists.

Leaving INdT...

I've been cooking this post for a couple of weeks, but due to many reasons, I was not able to publish it; until now.

Since Feb 19th, I have left my job at INdT. I remember as if it was yesterday. Almost 5 years ago, I was moving from the Central region of Brazil to the Northeast, 2.500 km away from home, in search of new challenges in my professional career and also in my personal life. I was leaving a very good job in the technical center of one of the biggest (if not the biggest) bank in Brazil to try something new and very exciting.

The proposal was to join a selected group of highly skilled people, whose task was to ramp up an arm of Nokia here in Brazil, focused on research and development, which I had never heard about before. That was how I met the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia, or simply, INdT. The thing that really caught my attention was the possibility to work directly with FOSS, while getting very well paid for that. What could ever be possibly better than that? ;)

By the time, besides of being a Linux user at home and having programmed using Open Source Software since the college, I had never actually contributed any single piece of code, documentation, translation or whatever, to an upstream project. Mostly because I had not yet understood the actual dynamic of developing software in the open. I was simply afraid of what was waiting for me on that corner.

I think those were new seas for INdT as well. Some of the guys that joined by that time, already had prior experience on the area, but a big part of us didn't. For this, and many other reasons, every day at the office was a different, joyful and exciting learning experience about the FOSS universe. That is something I am very thankful for.

As it happens very often with any company, it is necessary to make important decisions and focus on given areas. Unfortunately, and important to say, in my very own point of view, I realized that my piece of contribution to INdT had already been given. I really hope that it was useful somehow.

Time has come to find new opportunities, motivations and challenges in both professional and personal life. I'd like to thank very much and wish all the best to everyone I had the opportunity to work with during all this time. See you around!