Google Summer of Code 2008

Finally the results of accepted students in Google Summer of Code 2008 were out yesterday. As one of the applicant I was pretty curious whether I will be accepted or not. The schedule for the announcement was 21st April 2008 at 19.00 UTC but somehow when I logged in to the webapp the status of my applications still the same. There was no "rejection" or "accepted" status. Feel strange, I went to the google Soc discussion list and found out that there would be a delay in the announcement approximately 30 minutes or so. Curious to see the reactions of other students I logged in to #gsoc in Freenode. When I logged in, there were already about 850 people inside the channel!

Student's message from all of the world keep flowing through the channel asking about anything related to the announcement. They were very eager to see the results as soon as possible.After about 30 minutes, the admin explained that in few minutes they will push the emails. Well you can guess what happen after that, there were students that so excited that they're accepted and students that keeps wondering, asking why he got rejected. Me? Hmm, I was not in a rush to find out the result :D

Come on, more than 7000 applicants out there and I got selected? Give me a break :P Ok, I had my dinner first corned beef + fried eggs as usual, drank Red Bull Energy Drinks and....ok..ok..I will check my inbox. Eng.. ing..eng...New message from gsoc@google.com. The message is "Congratulations blablabla..." Hmm...this could be wrong, have to make sure to the dashboard. Went to the dashboard and just saw my project name, my name, and my mentor's name listed there. Still could be wrong? Thinking...Thinking..Ok, this is real, I got accepted. Excited? You bet! And I just go directly to Win's YM and typed " DAPAAAAAAAAAAT ".

So, what's the project all about? Luckily the project that I got accepted is the project that I'm interested the most, The project is ownered by OpenNMS my job is to make a cell phone interface to the OpenNMS system. Yeah, J2ME things.

Looking back through my effort to apply to this program, it wasn't easy. I applied for 3 organizations and sent 6 proposals. During the ranking phase one of the organization (SIP Communicator) asked me about how can I implement such functions to the existing software. Should I make a new implementation? Or should I use existing library? Or what? To be able to answer these questions I should look at the source code of the software!Wow..It would be difficult then... Thinking..Thinking...Ah come on previously I worked on RDPS in Divusi, I can manage to do Pak Riza's assignment in System Programming Course in IF..I can do this! Just try!

I downloaded the source code and tried to look at it. If you know about SIP Communicator, there are several protocols supported by it namely Jabber, YM, MSN etc and that's the first time I saw the codes how to implement such protocols. I just amazed and felt that, wow Opensource programmers are really rock! By the way SIP Communicator's source code is easier to understand I think, if you havent seen Pidgin's source code :D. Pidgin's source codes are written in C/C++, the GUI is using GTK and as a person that quite some time seldom to use C/C++ I can only see stars around the code :D (read: pointers) When I saw the codes what can I say was "RESPECT" (pake gayanya Ali G). So, Opensource, my respect to you ! (I think Arya will laugh and make fun of me if I say this :D )

Are there any other Indonesian accepted? As far as I know there are two others, Grady Laksmono (Moodle project) and I Nyoman Winardi Ribeka in OpenMRS (he's not Win!! Can you believe that?? ) I hope there are more Indonesian accepted.

Ok, to sum up, overall I feel happy but I think I was happier then this when I got accepted in IF ITB :D At least I don't regret that I quit IBM Extreme Blue selection in Amsterdam. But all in all, I still have exams to do, assignments to make, tons of papers to read, meetings to attend, interview to do etc. Wish me luck guys!

(Merdeka)+ (Ridho knows how to read this :D )