After GSoC ends Google hosts a Mentor Summit at the fabled Googleplex and the WorldForge folks invited me to come and attend and meet them. Some of you may already know but I "got my feet wet" with open source when I lurked around and general took up space in the WorldForge project. At the time I was going to school to be a 3D animator so I found myself amused with trying to figure out their art pipeline and getting content into it. At the time it was quite the process and since the main functioning client was 2D I was mostly useless since I can't draw. But regardless I met some amazing people whom are still with the project and whose abilities still humble me.
I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time over the weekend with Kai Blin (kblin or kai) and Erik Hjortsberg (erik on irc.worldforge.net). It was nice to finally meet them and we had many great conversations about the challenges in our space - notably MMO and virtual world development. Erik proposed (and ran) a FOSS Gaming session at the summit which I think was very successful. It was a nice experience because we had some great minds from projects like Wesnoth and CrystalSpace as well as some who are new to the FOSS game scene. As you can see from the session notes the conversation really focused on the things that challenge FOSS games the most and it seemed like most people agreed - non-programmer community members are one of the largest challenges. The question of how do you recruit, engage and enable individuals like concept creators, artists, musicians, sound engineers and so on. Jeremy Rosen (aka boucman) from Wesnoth had a lot of good comments in this session about how their project has worked with and embraced artists. I think we can learn a lot from these projects.
There were many great sessions on a variety of topics. I missed a few on Sunday that I truly would have like to have attended such as the session on Non-Coding Communities, Git for Data, Continuous Integration and LLVM.
I did attend a session on Static Code Analysis. The gentleman from SDL (Andreas Schiffler who maintains SDL_gfx) who ran this session spoke specifically about tools like splint which are great tools but riddled with false positives. Others talked about competitive commercial tools and their failings. All in all I think it would be great to have something like this integrated into our CDash builds so we could do something like a monthly full integration run (pull, configure, build clean, run unit tests with coverage and dynamic analysis plus static analysis) but it seems like a flawed tool for daily work. Regardless hearing the varying positions and experiences on static analysis was very useful.
In light of the recent announcement of the Mac App Store by Apple there was also a session about this very topic. The session was interesting and we spent a lot of time talking about the restrictions that Apple puts on projects/products that go into the App Store for iPhone. Jeremy Rosen of Wesnoth shared some of the stories around getting Wesnoth into the App Store for the iPhone and iPad. In reality it sounds like most of the limitations are essentially reasonable. I pointed out that we tend to forget that projects like Debian have onerous restrictions on how things are packaged, where they can run and so on. The session did really get me to thinking about what it would take to port Ryzom Core to iOS so that projects based on Ryzom Core could more easily go through the process of getting into the App Store. It sounds like we have a long way to go.
For kicks I attended a Distributed Version Control session which was essentially a session on how to use Darcs and how Darcs works. While I don't think I'd even remotely entertain moving to Darcs it was helpful to visualize the DVCS field through another set of eyes and it made me consider more complex branching and workflow. Plus it was a good opportunity to bring up our the dreaded non-code management conversation (aka art and artists and user-friendly interfaces.)
The final session I attended, due to the time of my flight and wanting to just hang out a bit after lunch with the WorldForge guys, was the Advanced Trolling session. This was a pretty hilarious session and someone was video taping it so I'm hoping it will appear on YouTube some time in the near future. It was a comical approach on essentially how do you identify and cope with trolls in your open source user community. It was performed from the perspective of teaching you TO troll as a means of combating trolls (hence Troll University).
All said I hope I have the opportunity to go next year.