Fall at the OSPO

The leaves are turning here in Mountain View, but they are not the only ones blazing away. It's a busy time of year for open source for Google, with lots of talks and events going on.

Recently:
- Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian (Fitz) Fitzpatrick gave their "Myth of the Genius Programmer" talk as part of the Opening sessions at "Reflections / Projections", the 15th ACM@UIUC Student Computing Conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

- They were joined by Googler and Python maintainer Alex Martelli, who spoke on "Python and the Programmer".

- Chris DiBona, head of the Open Source Programs Office at Google gave a keynote at AstriCon in Glendale, Arizona.

Currently:
- Earlier this week Leslie Hawthorn, manager of the Google Summer of Code program, was part of the amazing team that completed a new "Manual on GSoC Mentoring" in 2, count them, 2 DAYS, finishing up late last night. You will hear more about this feat in a later post after the...

- Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009, being held in Mountain View this weekend, October 24th and 25th. This invitation-only gathering of mentors from each of the participating mentoring organizations in this year's GSoC gives the projects a chance to come together to compare notes on the mentoring process and cross-pollinate their projects. A good time promises to be had by all, and a full report will be forthcoming.

Coming up:
- Jonathan Blocksom will be speaking on Google App Engine and the All For Good project at the DC edition of Stack Overflow Dev Days, October 26th.

- On October 4th the LISA Conference in Baltimore, Maryland will feature a talk by Daniel Berlin and Joe Gregorio on the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying open network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers. Interested attendees of LISA will be able to sign up for a developers Wave Sandbox Account. They will also have a chance to win Googley prizes at the Google Birds of a Feather session the next evening, hosted by Cat Allman and Tom Limoncelli.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs