FISL, I was there \o/

GNU and Me

My name is Marcos Paulino Roriz Junior, and I’m participating in Google Summer of Code™ for the first time this year. I’m really excited because I’ve been developing in Java for some time and this is my first step into FOSS. My project is hacking on GNU Classpath on Escher which is an X11 client written in Java, used by the XPeer code to request and handle drawings. I’m learning the X11 protocol which is amazingly cool and surely ahead of it’s time. This is not only helping me with Google Summer of Code but is also the main protocol behind thew idea that I’m using in my final year project.

When I applied to Google Summer of Code I had no idea how it was going to change my life. So far I have not only learned new things, but also met awesome developers. The climax of this was when I joined several other Brazillian students to ask Google for some financial help so that we could travel to FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre – International Free Software Forum) in Brazil. Google did an amazing favor and helped us so that we could learn about and spread free software to others. I met with several other students from the #gsoc-br IRC channel, met excellent FOSS developers, and gave a lecture about the Google Summer of Code experience.

At that talk I met more Google Summer of Code students, we shared our difficulties and we exchanged tips on how to solve problems. They all laughed a me when I said that I preferred svn over dscm, like git or mercurial. But at the same time they gave me a very brief and informal talk/introduction to git (which I’m kinda liking). I talked also a lot about X and XCB with friends and hackers there since it’s directly related to my proposal.

Google Summer of Code Students

I had a chance to meet some seriously cool developers (like Jon “Maddog” Hall) and attend amazing talks (like Glassfish in OSGi Bundles and What’s New on OpenJDK 7). Overall, It was a amazing experience, and I want to thank again Google, all the cool people at FISL and my mentor Mario Torre, who understands that I’m a little behind on my project but getting back to the schedule now =).

By Marcos Roriz, 2010 Google Summer of Code Student