I’m in Google Summer of Code!

First of all I’ll introduce myself for the new readers from Planet SoC and Planet GNOME. I’m 18 years old, live in Catalonia (but was born and lived in Germany before, my father being from there), I’m about to finish Technology Baccalaureate (after the summer I’ll start studying Computer Engineering) and I’ve been a GNU/Linux user for a bunch of years now; in fact, I’m an Ubuntu Developer and I intend to start Debian NM soon.

Now that you know I exist, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted for Google Summer of Code and that I’ll be working for GNOME this summer :). But what exactly will my project be, you may wonder?

Well, so there’s that GNOME Shell thing I’ve written about before [0], and although less known there’s also that other project called GNOME Zeitgeist, which consists in logging all your activity -files you open, websites you visit, etc.- and providing you with a journal of it so that you can easily find stuff you were working on “the other day”, but it also has other handy features like establishing relationships between files which can then be searched for [1]. My project consists in integrating Zeitgeist into the former.

For this, I’ll be working on GNOME Shell to pull the data from Zeitgeist over D-Bus (adding a D-Bus interface to it was initially part of my project, but somehow I got involved in Zeitgeist soon after submitting my application I’ve already done this by now :)) and display it nicely in its Clutter interface. This will be done in the “Recent documents” space, but I also have ideas for putting Zeitgeist bits into other places; more about this in a month, when I’ll start working on it.

Ah, my mentor on this will be Seif Lotfy, the lead developer of Zeitgeist. Here you have a sample of his great predisposition to help: «<seiflotfy1> don’t make me feel clueless, or I will destroy u» (sorry Seif, I really had to quote this! :P).

[0] In case you don’t know what GNOME Shell is, it’s basically a redesign of the desktop replacing gnome-panel and the visible Metacity stuff.
[1] By the way, LWN recently wrote about both projects in «Shell and Zeitgeist: the future of GNOME?».

Related posts:

  1. Zeitgeist since UDS Quite some stuff has been going on in Zeitgeist since UDS, including the addition of two new developers to our...
  2. Here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1! One month after the first Zeitgeist release (0.2), here is Zeitgeist 0.2.1! This version, which is fully backwards compatible with...
  3. Zeitgeist is out! World, the first Zeitgeist release is out! From the release announcement (slightly modified): ««« With great joy and excitement, the...
  4. Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2’s API So now that Zeitgeist 0.2.0 is out I’ve thought I’d write down some examples of how to use it’s API...
  5. UDS 2009 This being the first time I’m in person at a UDS, I know how difficult it is to follow it...

10 Comments »

 
  1. Felicitats! Estàs fet un crack!

  2. Congrats on getting into the program.

    A quick comment about Gnome Shell. I really do hope you and everyone working on Gnome Shell will continue to ask yourselves, “How does this benefit the user?” F/OSS doesn’t need to innovate just to be different. The user should always be kept in mind.

  3. Seif Lotfy says:

    I will destroy you (after GSoC) :P

  4. redox says:

    Felicitats!!! Ets el millor!

  5. Arnau says:

    Felicitats!!!!!

  6. @RainCT: Congratulations & welcome!

    @Nathan Nutter: Check the mailing lists for reasons why gnome-shell is developed, especially the disadvantages of the current gnome-panel.

  7. Jordi Mas says:

    Congrats!

    I’m sure that you will do very good job

    Regards,

    Jordi,

  8. Jared Spurbeck says:

    I think GNOME Shell sounds nifty. ^.^ But I’m worried about how it will conflict with my Global Menu Applet I have in the top panel …

  9. David Planella says:

    Congratulations Sigfried!

    I’m very glad to see GNOME getting some of your awesome work.

    Looking forward to reading you on Planet GNOME as well!

    Salut,
    David.

  10. Epíleg says:

    Felicitats RainCT!

    No tinc cap dubte que faràs una feina excel·lent.

    Salut,
    Epíleg.

 

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