Google Summer of Code 2010

It has been a while since I posted but life and RTEMS have been busy. The past few weeks have been a blur as GSoC 2010 approached. The UT Chattanooga IEEE-CS student chapter visited NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center here in Huntsville and OAR hosted them for lunch. Some Asterisk developers joined us and we presented GSoC, RTEMS and Asterisk to them. Earlier in the year, I had put together a cool double-sided flyer with RTEMS GSOC on one side and the general GSoC information on the other. Both sides had tear-offs which aligned close enough where you get the general and RTEMS specific GSoC URLs. For this visit, I put together a new flyer with the list of all participating organizations. I think it is important to let students know about all the cool organizations that participate.

The past couple of weeks have been hectic. I had work deadlines looming, one of my sons had H1N1, and RTEMS had more students than ever asking questions and submitting proposals for review. I had to update the VirtualBox image of Fedora 12 with RTEMS tools for the i386 and sparc pre-installed and make the torrent available. We had more students complete the hello world requirement and have proposals to review before the web app opened than we did all of last year!! We ask them to put their proposal into Google Docs and let mentors insert comments into that. We have so many students, I created a Google Docs Spreadsheet to track when each mentor had read the proposal and whether the student had submitted the official application. I spent this weekend ensuring I had read all of the proposals in hand.

Overall, I am thrilled with this year's crop of proposals and the number of cross-project proposals. We have students interested in Go on RTEMS, Parrot on RTEMS, and RTEMS support for the MilkyMist board. On top of that, we have students interested in adding a pluggable scheduler capability and EDF scheduler, coverage improvements, adding POSIX asynchronous and list IO, and much more. And two students from last year are back in a mentoring capacity. With a week to go before the student application deadline, I expect we will see more proposals and hope we are able to do a good job reviewing those. I know we will try to do so and be fair to all students making proposals. I am excited and hope we get enough slots to take on the students with quality, well thought out projects.