Planet SoC

Week #3 of Google’s Summer of Code is now over, so what have I been working on?

Rubyspec compatibility with 1.8.7 and newer 1.8.6 patchlevel versions

Due to internal changes to the way newer Ruby versions checked for the existance of magic methods like #to_str and #to_int, many of the already existing specs started failing (roughly more than 100 failures). After I started a discussion about this on the #rubyspec channel, Vladimir Sizikov raised his objections on this change on the Ruby-Core mailing list, where there are talks going on about potentially reverting this behaviour.

And the second week of Google’s Summer of Code comes to an end.

Over the course of the last week, I’ve been working on Net::FTP specs (really, that’s no fun!) and on specs for the Set library.

Thanks to the new specs I’ve added for Set and SortedSet, some bugs have been exposed, for which I’ve submitted bugs to Ruby’s shiny new bugtracker, based on RedMine:

Thanks to my participation in this years Summer of Code by Google, I’ve been asked some Questions by Mirko Stocker of InfoQ about the project I’ll be working on during this summer.

The full article with Questions and Answers by Federico Builes (the other GSoC student with a similar project) and me, has now been posted online at InfoQ.

Today is finally the start of GSoC’s first coding phase. It will end on the 6th of July, with a second coding phase starting on 15th of July and ending on the 18th of August. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to start working on my project yet, as I’m still having some days of school left, including exams. :(

I was accepted into Google’s Summer of Code Programm some time ago, but had not the time to write a decent blog entry about it yet.

What is Google’s Summer of Code?

GSoC is a program by Google, first held in 2005, in which Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete a contribution to an Open Source Project. Project ideas are either proposed by the so called Mentoring Organizations or by the students themselves. The Mentoring Organizations and Google then decide on the projects that will be accepted into the program. Luckily, my application for Improving Standard Library Specs was accepted and Benjamin Bleything is going to be my mentor. :D

The GSoC officially starts this year on May 26th and will end on September 1st.

W00t! I Just received my Summer of Code Gift from Google! Beautiful! :)

This unique and insightful book is a collection of master classes in software design. In each chapter, today’s leading programmers walk through elegant solutions to hard problems, and explain what makes those solutions so appealing.

Kudos to the Google Summer of Code Team for this great book!

Update:

I just found out that the book even contains a chapter written by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumuto, the creator of Ruby, the language that I’ll be writing specs for over the course of this years summer of code.