Got up at round 7am in the morning. Breakfast at the hotel. Took the CalTrain to Millbrea, BART to SFO. Dropped of luggage. BART to downtown SF, together with Marten Svanfeldt of Crystal Space. Had lunch at an Italian place close to Union Square, great pizza! Went to Fisherman’s Wharf & Pier 39. Took the cable car back. Lunch. BART to the airport.
Check-in & security went smoothly, now waiting for my flight to IAD (Dulles Intl, Washington D.C.).
Last night, food at Amarin Thai was very enjoyable, they just were a bit overloaded with the number of people when we overwhelm them ;)
Got up around 7am, took the shuttle to the Googleplex at 8am. Breakfast at Google. Opening remarks by Chris and Leslie.
First I participated a session on “GSoc Screening Students”, very valuable, session notes can be found here.
Listened to “Google Code Hosting” talk by Jason Robbins. It seems to be quite ambitious, centered around svn, offers a nice/very flexible issue tracker and you can just cherry pick the parts that you need. Quote: “We are building the hosting environment that we want to use ourselves, based on our experience with OSS projects”.
Lunch.
Attended Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick’s “Poisonous People” talk. Just great! (You can find a nice summary of this that here.)
Stayed in the Tunis meeting room for the rest of the day, to listen to a panel on what Google/GSoc can do to help FLOSS and enjoyed “sticky questions” afterwards. Closing comments / roundup.
Off to Ristorante Don Giovanni for dinner.
Conclusion: Like Marty Connor put it “many thanks to our hosts at Google for inviting us to the GSoC Mentor Conference, and to all who attended and made it such a successful, memorable time!”. We really had a great time!
In short this time: Nice stay at a hotel in Frankfurt, got up early to catch the flight to SFO. Arrived in SFO almost on time. Met Stanislav at the airport. Took the BART to Millbrae, got on CalTrain to Mountain View. Cab to the Hotel.
We are sitting in the lobby right now. The crowd is getting bigger every other minute. It really looks like an energetic weekend ahead ;) Now, off to Amarin Thai for dinner.
So, somehow I didn’t really spent any time blogging for the last couple of weeks. Sorry about that! I’ll try my best to blog a bit more in the upcoming weeks.
I left Nuremberg this morning, and right now I’m sitting on the train to Goettingen, to attend my grandmothers 90th birthday and seeing family and relatives. Later today, I’ll journey on to Frankfurt. My flight leaves FRA on Friday morning, and it would just be to risky to go to Frankfurt in the morning (well, and I didn’t really feel like getting up at 4:00 in the morning ;)) — so staying at a hotel close to the airport solves that problem. Given planes are on time, I’ll be in San Francisco by noon (local time). The plan is to get on the BART first and then take CalTrain to Mountain View. I’ll stay in the Bay Area until Sunday night, to catch my flight to Washington DC, where I’ll meet meet with some old friends.
Oh, I didn’t tell you why I’m going to Mountain View yet. This is the story: As we have successfully participated in Google Summer of Code with openSUSE, Google has invited two representatives per participating organization to attend the so called Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. For openSUSE, Stanislav Brabec and myself are attending.
The GSoC Mentor Summits main theme will be evaluating this years Summer of Code and talking about how to improve SoC in the future. It’s also meant to be a forum for an open dialog between different Open Source projects and Google. All in all, I guess this will be an awesome event!