Between OPW and GSoC, 2013 Will Be a Summer of Awesome

Earlier I wrote about how this year we are participating in Google Summer of Code and GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Well, we just got announced all the students we're accepting. It's quite a few in quite a few awesome areas! In alphabetical order:

  • Aditi Mittal (mentored by Sebastian Spaeth) will be building a new media type for... blogging! By doing blogging as a media type we should be able to compete with media/blogging hybrid systems like Tumblr without compromising on MediaGoblin's core design.

  • Emily O'Leary (mentored by me, Christopher Allan Webber) will be improving our test suite and helping with bug triage.

  • Jessica Tallon (mentored by Joar Wandborg) will be building... that's right!... federation support for MediaGoblin through the Pump API.

    Jessica has a rare hyper-qualification for this, already working on a PyPump library. We're already talking about various improvements to that library's API to make it fit well into MediaGoblin and to ease federation for other systems too!

  • Natalie Foust-Pilcher (mentored by Aeva Palecek through Outreach Program for Women) will be working on building us an awesome new administrative interface!

  • Praveen Kumar (mentored by me, Christopher Allan Webber) will be adding a search interface to MediaGoblin! A long running request!

  • Rodney Ewing (mentored by Aaron Williamson) will be working on making our user authentication system super flexible and pluginified with multiple new backends! He's already making great progress!

The main problem we had this year is that (and really, I do mean this) we had so many awesome applications this year that picking between them was very tough. And I can say this with some experience: I've done mentoring for Summer of the Code in the past and I can say that I've never seen so many amazing proposals at once.

One thing's for sure though: this summer is going to be awesome. Go go goblins!