Google Code-in students: Simply the best

During the Google Code-in contest SymPy had a total of 176 tasks completed by 64 students.

Some highlights of the program:

- The Sympy webpage is now translated into five languages and our tutorial is translated into three languages.

- The interface for SymPy Live was completely rewritten, and many new features, such as tab completion, full screen mode, saved searches, and recent searches were added. We also now have a mobile version of the site available. If you have not used SymPy Live since the start of the Google Code-in program, I encourage you to check it out.

- Our documentation, in particular our Sphinx documentation, was vastly improved. For example, as a result of the program we are now much closer to the goal of including every public functions' docstrings in the Sphinx docs.  We are also now much closer to the goal of complete docstring/doctest coverage for public functions, classes, and methods throughout SymPy. Other documentation was improved as well, such as the isympy manpage and the new cheat sheet.

- Various bug fixes, cleanups, and improvements throughout the code base, as well as changes to our web page and wiki.

For full information about which tasks were completed, see our page on the Google Code-in site.

Thanks to all of these students for your contributions!  We hope that you will continue to contribute to SymPy outside the program, and that you will use SymPy when you find yourself in need of a symbolic mathematics system.

I would also like to thank all the mentors and anyone who helped to review tasks for Google Code-in.
Some of the mentors who helped include: Aaron Meruer, Alexey Gudchenko, Chris Smith, Christian Muise, Hector (Prafullkumar P. Tale), Joachim Durchholz, Mateusz Paprocki, Matthew Rocklin, Ondřej Čertík, Ronan Lamy, Saptarshi Mandal, Stefan Krastanov, and Vladimir Perić.

Thank you to each and every one of you.  Without your mentoring help and assistance with various other things like developing the tasks, SymPy's participation in this contest would not have been possible.

Finally, I want to thank Google for putting on this contest.  This goes out especially to the Google Open Source Programs Office for running the contest and to the developers of Melange, who were helpful throughout the whole process.

By Aaron Meurer and the SymPy development team

Mentoring Organization Applications Now Being Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

Now in its eighth year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academic research, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 6,000 students from 90 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 350 mentoring organizations. Students gain exposure to real-world software development while earning a stipend for their work and an opportunity to explore areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects as these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

This year we are again encouraging experienced Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations to refer newer, smaller organizations they think could benefit from the program to apply. Last year we had 49 of these small organizations join the program and we hope the referral program will again bring many more new organizations to the Google Summer of Code program.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, March 9th at 23:00 UTC (3pm PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Friday, March 16th. Students will then have 10 days to reach out to the accepted organizations to discuss their project ideas before we begin accepting student applications on March 26th.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details. For more information you can check out the Mentor Manual and timeline for and join the discussion group. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Open Monitor: Building a World Wide Internet Connectivity Monitor through Google Summer of Code 2011

Despite all the magnificent improvements to both technology and the internet these days, we lack a free and open source real time internet connectivity monitor from which anyone can tell what the connectivity conditions are in any part of the world. Solving this problem is a huge undertaking, but at Umit Project, we saw a chance to start developing such a solution through the Google Summer of Code when we were chosen as a mentoring organization for the 2011 program.
   
We chose a hybrid P2P approach that would consist of hybrid peers and a centralized server that we call the aggregator. The hybrid peers would be able to communicate with each other and pass along reports even if direct connection to the aggregator is blocked, acting as both a server and client and promoting themselves to super peers as needed. The aggregator would be responsible for gathering all the connectivity reports from the peers and showing them in real time in a Google App Engine based site using the Google Maps API.

We also thought of having three different kinds of peers: desktop peer, desktop super peer and mobile peer. The desktop peer runs on top of the same code base but promotion to super peer status is based on the peer's availability. The desktop version is very portable (runs on Mac, Linux and Windows) and is written in Python, while the mobile peer is Android based, can not turn into a super peer and is focused on getting us a view from inside mobile ISPs.

We were given three talented students for the three month long Google Summer of Code, and each of them tackled the different pieces of the system. Despite the overwhelming amount of work and the short time frame they were working with, the students managed to get these systems to form a network, communicate, run connectivity tests and share reports.

The Umit Project team has been working very hard since Google Summer of Code ended in August to deliver our first version of Open Monitor and we're very close to releasing an alpha in the next few weeks for selected trusted testers.

If you're interested in knowing more about the project, its motivation, and more technical details about it, we have released a video on YouTube of a presentation given about the project at the Creativity World Forum 2011 and another talk given at the Chicago Python User Group Meeting. Slides of the CWF11 presentation are also available to view.

Special thanks to Google for their amazing Google Summer of Code program!

By Adriano Marques, Director of Umit Project and Google Summer of Code mentor