- Part 10

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Pie in your face — without the mess

May 21, 2015

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google is back with an exciting new release for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android game) to add support for Google Cardboard, letting you jump into the action directly using your Android phone as a virtual reality headset! Select your targets by looking at them and throw pies with a flick of the switch.

Look out for incoming pie!

We used the Cardboard SDK for Android, which helps simplify common virtual reality tasks like head tracking, rendering for Cardboard, and handling specialized input events. And you might remember us from before, bringing exciting game technologies like FlatBuffers, Pindrop, and Motive, all of which you can see in use in Pie Noon.

You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon on Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we brought an existing game into virtual reality.

By Anthony Maurice, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

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GSoC 2015 Stats Part 2: Universities

May 19, 2015

For the second statistics post for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015 we focus on the universities that our accepted students attend. With this being the 11th year of GSoC we have listed the top 11 schools with the highest number of accepted students for 2015. You’ll notice many familiar names on the list with a couple of new additions to the list. Congratulations to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad for claiming the top spot for the second consecutive year.

University	Country	# of Accepted Students in 2014	# of Accepted Students in 2015
International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad	India	69	62
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	44	44
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	26	18
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	25	15
Budapest University of Technology and Economics	Hungary	12	14
University POLITEHNICA Of Bucharest	Romania	17	14
Bejing (Peking) University	China	5	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	India	15	13
Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi	India	13	12
National University of Singapore	Singapore	14	11
University of Buea	Cameroon	3	10

As no surprise, the majority of this year’s students are enrolled in Computer Science, IT and other technical degree programs. GSoC is by no means only for those pursuing CS degrees though — in 2015 we have students pursuing degrees in fields including Astronomy, Geomatics, Law, Music, Oceanography and Philosophy.

A big thank you to all of the professors, schools and alumni who support the Google Summer of Code program. The goal of GSoC is to get students excited about open source development, help build their coding skills and gain real world experience working with open source software projects. We hope that the experience will help them in their careers regardless of the university they attend.

For more statistics on this year’s program check out our country post and be on the lookout for more GSoC 2015 statistics posts in the coming weeks.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

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Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with KDE

May 7, 2015

The KDE community was one of the twelve mentoring organizations which took part in Google Code-in 2014, our open source coding contest for 13 to 17 year old students. Mentor and co-administrator Heena Mahour wrote in to tell us about the students’ accomplishments with KDE.

KDE is an international free software community. We’re best known for the Plasma Desktop which is the default for several Linux distributions, but we produce an entire integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and OS X systems. We’re also an umbrella project for many standalone applications based on our technology.

The KDE community participated in Google Code-in (GCI) to inspire young contributors and offer them an opportunity to get involved with KDE and open source. We created 277 tasks for students to choose from, and 29 mentors volunteered to help the students with their work. Of the many projects that are part of KDE, the team behind the Marble virtual globe created the most tasks for us with 50. We also provided 65 different beginner tasks to help students without any experience take their first step as an open source contributor before moving on to more challenging tasks.

Tasks in GCI come in several categories. We offered 190 coding tasks, 26 for documentation and training, and 41 for quality assurance. It was a joy for us to see students working with the mentors and learning how to become part of an open source community. At the end of the contest, 240 tasks had been completed!

Like every organization taking part, we were able to select two students as Grand Prize Winners. From the students who completed the most tasks successfully, we considered the creativity, thoroughness, and quality of their work. Mikhail Ivchenko from Russia and Ilya Kowalewski from Ukraine were selected as our winners and will soon be visiting Google’s headquarters along with the other GCI winners.

We’re all grateful for the opportunity GCI gave us to work with these enthusiastic young students and get them involved with KDE. We hope to continue seeing their names in the future — keep it up, everyone!

by Heena Mahour, KDE mentor and co-administrator

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GSoC 2015 stats part 1: All about the countries

May 5, 2015

As we gear up for the start of the 11th Google Summer of Code, we’ve been putting together some interesting numbers and stats for this year’s program. Every year within minutes of the accepted students being announced, we are asked “how many students from my country were accepted?” and “how many students from my school were accepted?” We’ll be answering these kinds of questions with a few posts over the next few weeks, starting today.

Let’s start with our country-specific stats. Last year when we decided to list all of the countries with accepted students it was a huge hit, so why mess with success? The 73 countries represented by this year’s 1,051 GSoC accepted students are listed alphabetically below.

Argentina	2	Kuwait	1
Armenia	1	Lithuania	1
Australia	4	Luxembourg	2
Austria	8	Malaysia	1
Bangladesh	1	Mexico	5
Belarus	6	Moldavia	2
Belgium	2	Morocco	1
Brazil	15	Netherlands	10
Bulgaria	2	New Zealand	2
Cameroon	12	Nigeria	1
Canada	23	Norway	3
Chile	1	Pakistan	2
China	49	Paraguay	1
Colombia	2	Peru	2
Croatia	4	Philippines	2
Czech Republic	3	Poland	33
Denmark	1	Portugal	13
Dominican Republic	1	Romania	19
Ecuador	1	Russian Federation	38
Egypt	7	Singapore	11
Estonia	1	Slovak Republic	6
Finland	5	South Korea	5
France	18	Spain	30
Germany	50	Sri Lanka	58
Greece	9	Sweden	3
Guatemala	1	Switzerland	5
Honduras	1	Taiwan	2
Hong Kong	4	Tunisia	2
Hungary	23	Turkey	8
India	335	Uganda	1
Indonesia	1	Ukraine	8
Ireland	3	United Arab Emirates	3
Italy	19	United Kingdom	13
Jamaica	1	United States	127
Japan	6	Uruguay	1
Kazakhstan	1	Vietnam	2
Kenya	4

We have two countries being represented by students for the first time this year: Kuwait and United Arab Emirates – welcome to the GSoC family! With these two additions, we now have 103 countries where students have been accepted into the GSoC program since 2005.

As you may have seen in recent posts, there are many students and mentors throughout Africa and all around the world working very hard to spread the word about GSoC to their communities. We are happy to announce that Cameroon quadrupled their number of accepted students in 2015 to 12!

In our upcoming posts, we will delve deeper into the stats by looking at the universities with the most accepted students, degrees sought by students, gender numbers, and mentor stats. If you have other questions that you’d like to ask, please leave a comment on this post and we will try to answer your question in an upcoming post.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

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Open Location Code: Addresses for everything, everywhere

Apr 30, 2015

Accurate street addresses are taken for granted in much of the world. But in many areas, formal street names and addresses don’t exist and the only real alternative is to use addresses of the form “behind the old bus stop”. Without a street address, it’s difficult to organise deliveries, to receive visitors or to find businesses. And street addresses only work where there are named and numbered streets – without these, there’s no easy way to provide someone with a location.

Area with unknown street names in Indonesia. (Google Maps)

Latitude and longitude coordinates can specify any location, but they’re long and cumbersome. What if they were more human-friendly, like a very accurate postcode that refers to just your home? We’re happy to share Open Location Code, a stand-alone open source library for this purpose.

Open Location Codes are derived from latitude and longitude coordinates, so they already exist everywhere. They are similar in length to a telephone number — 849VCWC8+R9, for example — but can often be shortened to only four or six digits when combined with a locality (CWC8+R9, Mountain View). Locations close to each other have similar codes. They can be encoded or decoded offline, and the character set was chosen to avoid spelling words in more than 30 different languages. We removed similar looking characters to reduce confusion and errors, and because they aren’t case-sensitive, they can be easily exchanged over the phone.


World’s largest carrot, H3+XG Ohakune, New Zealand.	The big gumboot. GV+8J Taihape, New Zealand.

Developers of websites that need location from users (such as delivery or taxi firms in locations where street addresses are poorly defined) could use these codes to get accurate locations from their users. Other services which map locations that don’t have street addresses (such as water sources, mountain refuges, or nesting sites) could use these codes since they don’t rely on street information.


The big trout. 2W+GW Gore, New Zealand.	Kime Hut, in New Zealand’s Tararua Ranges.

We have a sample implementation to find and use codes at plus.codes. You can download the latest release of the library from our GitHub page and join our discussion list to learn more.

by Doug Rinckes, Travel team

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Students announced for Google Summer of Code 2015

Apr 27, 2015

Congratulations to the 1,051 students accepted for our 2015 Google Summer of Code! It was tough for the 137 mentoring organizations to choose from the huge number of applications we received – 6,409 proposals from 4,425 students – and we want to thank …

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New projects in GSoC 2015

Apr 23, 2015

As the summer draws near, we’re getting ready to announce the students accepted into Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015. With guidance from mentors, those students will spend their summer coding for one of the 137 open source projects that are participating this year.

This is the 11th summer we’ve run the program and many of the projects have been part of GSoC in the past, but we also have 30 projects which are making their GSoC debut this year. Welcome to GSoC, we’re looking forward to seeing the students’ contributions to your work!

Africa Soil Information Service
Bika Open Source LIMS Collective
Boston University / XIA
CentOS Project
CloudCV
Department of Biomedical Informatics, Stony Brook University
Foundation for Learning Equality
GitHub
Global Alliance for Genomics & Health
Google Kubernetes
HPCC Systems
Liquid Galaxy Project, Interactive Spaces
IP-over-P2P Project
JdeRobot – Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
jQuery Foundation
lowRISC
MBDyn, Department of Aerospace Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan
MEDES-IMPS
MinnowBoard Project
NumFOCUS
OncoBlocks
P2PSP.org
Pencil Code Foundation
Portable Native Client
Red Hen Lab
RIOT
Rspamd spam filtering system
Saros
Sustainable Computing Research Group ( SCoRe )
University of Nebraska – Helikar Lab

You can learn more about all of this year’s participating organizations at the program website. Students, check back on Monday, April 27th to see if your application has been accepted.

by Ashleigh Rentz, Open Source Programs Office

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Jsonnet: a more elegant language for composing JSON

Apr 20, 2015

A few months ago, we quietly released Jsonnet: a simple yet rich configuration language (i.e., a programming language for specifying data). Many systems can be configured with JSON, but writing it by hand is troublesome. Jsonnet is packed with useful data-specification features that expand into JSON for other systems to act upon. Below is a trivial example of such expansion:

// Jsonnet Example
{
   person1: {
       name: “Alice”,
       welcome: “Hello “ + self.name + “!”,
   },
   person2: self.person1 { name: “Bob” },
}

➡

{
  “person1″: {
     “name”: “Alice”,
     “welcome”: “Hello Alice!”
  },
  “person2″: {
     “name”: “Bob”,
     “welcome”: “Hello Bob!”
  }
}

Jsonnet doesn’t just generate JSON: Jsonnet is also an extension of JSON. By adding new constructs between the gaps of existing JSON syntax, Jsonnet adds useful features without breaking backwards compatibility. Any valid JSON is also a valid Jsonnet program that simply emits that JSON unchanged, and existing systems that consume JSON (or its cousin YAML) can be easily modified to accept data in the full Jsonnet language. As such, Jsonnet is an example of a templating language, but one specifically designed for JSON data and less error-prone than other techniques.

“Jsonnet” is a portmanteau of JSON and sonnet. We chose that name to convey that data expressed in Jsonnet is easier to write and maintain because it is more elegant and concise, like a poem. This is not just due to syntactic niceties like comments and permissive quotes/commas, but because Jsonnet has all the modern multi-paradigm programming language conveniences needed to manage complexity. One key benefit is the ability to use Jsonnet’s mixin and import features to write modular configuration template libraries, allowing the creation of domain-specific configuration languages for particular applications.

Most configuration languages are created ad-hoc for the needs of a given application, accruing features over time and becoming unwieldy. From day one, Jsonnet was designed as a coherent programming language, benefitting from both academic techniques and our experience implementing production languages. Unlike most configuration languages, Jsonnet has a full operational semantics, ensuring matching behavior from third party implementations as well as mathematical analysis. It is a very small and carefully chosen extension to JSON that can express both object-oriented and declarative styles. More importantly, unlike regular programming languages, Jsonnet is hermetic: Its evaluation is independent of any implicit environmental factors, ensuring that high level configuration will resolve to the same thing every time.

Jsonnet is open source. It’s currently available as a library with C and Python bindings, and also as a command line utility. A real-world example configuration can be found on the website, where 217 lines (9.7kB) of Jsonnet expand into 740 lines (25kB) of configuration for other tools. Learn more about Jsonnet by reading the tutorial and experimenting with our javascript demo!

by Dave Cunningham, New York Technical Infrastructure team

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Student ambassadors bring GSoC 2015 to more African students

Apr 16, 2015

Student applications for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2015 closed on March 27th and this year’s mentoring organizations are now busy reviewing student proposals. While we await the results of that process, we’ve been looking at some of the early statistics for this year’s program.

One thing we’re very excited to see is that we received nearly four times as many student applications from Sub-Saharan Africa compared to last year! The gain primarily came from four countries: Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. These countries combined had just 45 students apply in 2014, but that number jumped up to 183 this year. Why was the increase concentrated in these locations? There’s a common thread that seems to be responsible: they are places where students active in the Google Student Ambassador (GSA) program organized local GSoC meet-up events.

Cameroon

After lending a hand to a fellow student organizing a meetup in December, GSA Tekang Check brought 77 students together in March at the University of Buea to learn about GSoC and help students apply. Participants from past years shared their experiences and encouraged attendees to submit proposals for projects they felt passionate about.

Kenya

GSA John Muchiri welcomed over 100 students from St Paul’s University to a GSoC meet-up. The speakers talked about the characteristics good programmers develop and encouraged students to challenge themselves by applying to the program.

At Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, GSAs Isaac Jumba and Dickson Marienga introduced students to GSoC as part of the local DevFest event which drew over 150 attendees. The session gave an overview of GSoC and encouraged students to sign up for a regional GSoC enthusiasts mailing list.

Nigeria

GSAs Ilo Calistus, Okwara Godswill, and Mgbemena Chike collaborated on a pair of events at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. The first introduced students to the basics of programming for Android while the second taught students about using Git. Both events also introduced students to the world of open source and encouraged them to take part in GSoC.

At Ekiti State University, GSAs Sadiq Mary Oiza and Alabea Dare Micheal organized a GSoC meet-up for 35 students. After a discussion about current events at the university, the presenters gave an overview of the GSoC program and encouraged students to create profiles on the program website.

GSA James Uzoma organized a meet-up at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta where 40 students from 6 colleges enjoyed a series of talks featuring stories from fellow Nigerians who had participated in past years, an explanation of the requirements for participating, and some details about the different open source organizations students could apply to work with.

Uganda

GSA Kagimu Brian brought together 72 students for a GSoC meet-up at Mbarara University of Science and Technology. Attendees learned about the benefits and experiences that can come from taking part in GSoC, along with an introduction to Git.

Only a limited number of students can be accepted in GSoC each year, but we hope to welcome several of the students who attended these events into this year’s program. Accepted students will be notified via email by 19:00 UTC on April 27th, so keep watching your inbox.

By Ashleigh Rentz, Open Source team

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UIforETW: Windows Profiling Made Easier

Apr 14, 2015

Microsoft’s Event Tracing for Windows (ETW, aka xperf) is an amazing tool for understanding the performance of Windows computers. ETW offers an incredibly deep view into the entire system and allows investigations of complex problems that would otherwise be intractable. It can even be used to record traces on a customer’s machine for later analysis on a developer’s machine, to investigate performance problems that cannot be reproduced locally.

However, the process of recording ETW trace has always been challenging, so we’re pleased to share a new tool we’ve been developing: UIforETW. This tool brings point-and-click simplicity to recording ETW traces, works around several trace recording bugs, and is a handy dashboard for managing and annotating traces. And since UIforETW is open source, you can add additional features for your own particular needs.

Tracing can be done to a file or to an in-memory circular buffer. Trace compression, high-speed sampling, heap tracing, and other options can be configured with the click of a button. UIforETW lists the recorded traces and lets users rename and annotate them. When you want to analyze a trace, you can launch Microsoft’s trace viewers from UIforETW, and UIforETW will configure improved viewer defaults for WPA.

UIforETW was written by a Chrome developer, so it has a few Chrome specific features. If the Chrome symbol server is enabled, then UIforETW downloads and strips the Chrome symbols in order to avoid a twenty five minute delay when WPA loads the symbols. UIforETW also preprocesses the traces in order to categorize the Chrome processes by type. These features can be turned off in the Settings dialog if you aren’t working on Chrome. While the Chrome specific features will not be needed by most developers, they demonstrate the potential value from custom processing of traces.

UIforETW is a new project but is already being used for production work. More technical details and information about UIforETW and ETW in general can be found in the author’s blog post and discussions can be had at our discussion group. Information about contributing to UIforETW can be found in the CONTRIBUTING file in the GitHub repo.

by Bruce Dawson, Chrome team

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Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with Drupal

Apr 10, 2015

Drupal, one of the Google Code-in 2014 mentoring organizations, has been working toward the release of a new major version. Grand prize winner Getulio Valentin Sanchez contributed to the upcoming release during the contest and shared his story with us.

I was 13 years old the first time I got access to a computer. I had no idea how to connect it to the internet, but that didn’t stop me from experimenting. When I was 14, I saw a documentary about Google and discovered that “programming” and “coding” were completely different things than I’d thought. In that same documentary, I saw Google’s offices and I resolved to myself that I would try to visit them in person by the time I turned 18.

After participating in an OMAPA Computer Olympics event here in Paraguay, a Google Code-in (GCI) mentor from Sugar Labs contacted me to ask if I could help spread the word about GCI in my local community. During that conversation, the mentor encouraged me to enter GCI myself. He pointed out that Drupal was one of the mentoring organizations and they use a lot of PHP, the language I’m most familiar with.

Before GCI, I had never worked with an open source project, nor did I know how to create a patch or anything like that. But since it was a possible opportunity to achieve the dream I’d set for myself, I thought “why not learn something new?”

When the contest began, I got to work on my first task: porting the simple but useful Scroll To Top module to Drupal 8. It was astonishing to me when my patch was approved and committed. With that astonishment came an amazing sensation in knowing that somewhere in the world, someone will be using something that I made. Tasks like these were a little challenging, but I quickly fell in love with this type of work and created a series of blog posts and a video about the process.

I continued porting modules to Drupal 8 throughout the GCI contest. I think the most difficult task I faced was porting the Administer Users by Role module. This wasn’t because it’s a large module, but rather because I had to learn about access checking which I’d never heard about before. Although this wasn’t impossible, it took me about a week to get an initial version ready for the community’s consideration.

The seven weeks I spent participating in GCI taught me a lot. I learned about following coding standards, programming concepts like dependency injection and the Hollywood principle, some of the more powerful features of Git, and features of PHP that I hadn’t even known existed!

People say every end is a new beginning, and that’s been true for me. The end of GCI 2014 was also the beginning of my experience as a regular contributor to Drupal. I now spend my weekends working with this amazing platform and collaborating with the Drupal community. And soon, I’ll be beginning my journey to see Google’s offices in person like I’d dreamed of before — I began with a humble “Hello World” and eventually became one of the GCI 2014 Grand Prize Winners.

by Getulio Valentin Sanchez, GCI grand prize winner

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We throw pie with a little help from our friends

Apr 9, 2015

(Cross-posted with the Google Developers Blog)

Fun Propulsion Labs at Google* is back today with some new releases for game developers. We’ve updated Pie Noon (our open source Android TV game) with networked multi-screen action, and we’ve also added some delicious new libraries we’ve been baking since the original release: the Pindrop audio library and the Motive animation system.

Pie Noon multi-screen action

Got an Android TV and up to 4 friends with Android phones or tablets? You’re ready for some strategic multi-player mayhem in this updated game mode. Plan your next move in secret on your Android phone: will you throw at an opponent, block an incoming attack, or take the risky approach and wait for a larger pie? Choose your target and action, then watch the Android TV to see what happens!

We used the NearbyConnections API from the most recent version of Google Play Games services to easily connect smartphones to your Android TV and turn our original Pie Noon party game into a game of turn-based strategy. You can grab the latest version of Pie Noon from Google Play to try it out, or crack open the source code and take a look at how we used FlatBuffers to encode data across the network in a fast, portable, bandwidth-efficient way.

Pindrop: an open source game audio library

Pindrop is a cross-platform C++ library for managing your in-game audio. It supports cross compilation to Android, Linux, iOS and OSX. An early version of this code was part of the first Pie Noon release, but it’s now available as a separate library that you can use in your own games. Pindrop handles loading and unloading sound banks, tracking sound locations and listeners, prioritization of your audio channels, and more.

Pindrop is built on top of several other pieces of open source technology:

SDL Mixer is used as a backend for actually playing the audio.
The loading of data and configuration files is handled by our serialization library, FlatBuffers.
Our own math library, MathFu, is used for a number of under-the-hood calculations.

You can download the latest open source release from our GitHub page. Documentation is available here and a sample project is included in the source tree. Please feel free to post any questions in our discussion list.

Motive: an open source animation system

The Motive animation system can breathe life into your static scenes. It does this by applying motion to simple variables. For example, if you’d like a flashlight to shine on a constantly-moving target, Motive can animate the flashlight so that it moves smoothly yet responsively.

Motive animates both spline-based motion and procedural motion. These types of motion are not technically difficult, but they are artistically subtle. It’s easy to get the math wrong. It’s easy to end up with something that moves as required but doesn’t quite feel right. Motive does the math and lets you focus on the feeling.

Motive is scalable. It’s designed to be extremely fast. It also has a tight memory footprint — smaller than traditional animation compression — that’s based on Dual Cubic Splines. Our hope is that you might consider using Motive as a high-performance back-end to your existing full-featured animation systems.

This initial release of Motive is feature-light since we focused our early efforts on doing something simple very quickly. We support procedural and spline-based animation, but we don’t yet support data export from animation packages like Blender or Maya. Motive 1.0 is suitable for props — trees, cameras, extremities — but not fully rigged character models. Like all FPL technologies, Motive is open source and cross-platform. Please check out the discussion list, too.

What’s Fun Propulsion Labs at Google?

You might remember us from such Android games as Pie Noon, LiquidFun Paint, and VoltAir, and such cross-platform libraries as MathFu, LiquidFun, and FlatBuffers.

Want to learn more about our team? Check out this recent episode of Game On! with Todd Kerpelman for the scoop!

by Jon Simantov, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google

* Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that’s dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

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Google Code-in 2014 wrap up with FOSSASIA

Apr 3, 2015

Although best known for their namesake conference, FOSSASIA also acts as an umbrella organization which supports development of open source software linked to Asia or Asian developers. They participated in Google Code-in 2014 and shared this report with us.

2014 marked FOSSASIA’s first year participating in Google Code-in (GCI) as a mentoring organization, and what a splash we made! Students completed 587 tasks with us, the most of any organization in this year’s program. These bite-sized tasks gave young students ages 13 to 17 an opportunity to participate in open source development with the help of mentors. A total of 174 students completed at least one task with us — they wrote code, designed artwork, tested software, and had a lot of fun.

GCI is a contest and each mentoring organization chooses two Grand Prize winners. Ours were Namanyay Goel and Samarjeet Singh. They’ll travel all-expenses-paid with a parent or guardian to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. We also had three finalists who deserve a hearty congratulations: Alvis Wong, Amr Ramadan, and Tymon Radzik. We are thankful for your contributions.

Students contributed to the FOSSASIA website along with open source projects like the ExpEYES tool for at-home science experiments, the sup console-based email client, the TiddlySpace idea-organizer, and the p5.js drawing library. This wide variety of opportunities was possible thanks to the efforts of our 24 mentors who found time between their other obligations to help students. Thank you, mentors!

Usually, novice contributors to a project face a significant barrier to entry. There are coding conventions to follow, guidelines for combining or breaking up multiple commits, and more that can be specific to a project. Such requirements help keep the codebase healthy and consistent, but their value isn’t apparent to beginners who have already struggled to produce a contribution and just want to see it integrated. To reduce the discouragement GCI students would face, we decided to merge students’ first pull requests if they get the job done, even if they don’t follow our usual practices. Later, students could accept a task which teaches them about our standards for contributions, giving them a chance to clone and rebase a sample repo so that it follows the rules. Students who completed this task and continued working with us understood the terminology and were able to apply our feedback to their later commits without the usual frustration.

We had a fantastic time participating in GCI and would like to thank all the students who took part in the contest. We’re thrilled to see some of them still hanging around in our community and wish them all an exciting and fruitful future.

By Aruna Herath, FOSSASIA mentor

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FlatBuffers 1.1: a memory-efficient serialization library

Apr 2, 2015

After months in development, the FlatBuffers 1.1 update is here. Originally released in June 2014, it’s a highly efficient open source cross-platform serialization library that allows you to read data without parsing/unpacking or allocating additional memory. It supports schema evolution (forwards/backwards compatibility) and optional JSON conversion. We primarily created it for games written in C++ where performance is critical, but it’s also useful more broadly. This update brings:

an extensive overhaul to the Java API
out-of-the-box support for C# and Go
an optional verifier to make FlatBuffers practical in untrusted scenarios
.proto parsing for easier migration from Protocol Buffers
optional manual assignment of field IDs
dictionary functionality through binary search on a key field
bug fixes and other improvements thanks to 200+ commits from 28 contributors — thank you!

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list for more details.

By Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that’s dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

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How to format Python code without really trying

Mar 30, 2015

Years of writing and maintaining Python code have taught us the value of automated tools for code formatting, but the existing ones didn’t quite do what we wanted. In the best traditions of the open source community, it was time to write yet another Python formatter.

YAPF takes a different approach to formatting Python code: it reformats the entire program, not just individual lines or constructs that violate a style guide rule. The ultimate goal is to let engineers focus on the bigger picture and not worry about the formatting. The end result should look the same as if an engineer had worried about the formatting.

You can run YAPF on the entire program or just a part of the program. It’s also possible to flag certain parts of a program which YAPF shouldn’t alter, which is useful for generated files or sections with large literals.

Consider this horribly-formatted code:

x = { ‘a':37,’b':42,

‘c':927}

y = ‘hello ”world’

z = ‘hello ‘+’world’

a = ‘hello {}’.format(‘world’)

class foo ( object ):

def f (self ):

return \

37*-+2

def g(self, x,y=42):

return y

def f ( a ) :

return 37+-+a[42-x : y**3]

YAPF reformats this into something much more consistent and readable:

x = {‘a': 37, ‘b': 42, ‘c': 927}

y = ‘hello ‘ ‘world’

z = ‘hello ‘ + ‘world’

a = ‘hello {}’.format(‘world’)

class foo(object):

def f(self):

return 37 * -+2

def g(self, x, y=42):

return y

def f(a):

return 37 + -+a[42 – x:y ** 3]

Head to YAPF’s GitHub page for more information on how to use it, and take a look at YAPF’s own source code to see a much larger example of the output it produces.

by Bill Wendling, YouTube Code Health Team

Read | No Comments | Tags: Google Open Source

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