Heading to Google SoC Mentor Summit Today

This evening I’ll be flying out to California for Google’s [http://code.google.com/soc/ Summer of Code] Mentor Summit on be-half of the PostgreSQL project. The Summit is an [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference unconference] designed around discussing ways to increase partiticpation, improve the processes, and generally just ways to make the program better. Also there will be some discussion on getting more mentors involved and also keeping students involved after the program ends, two things I am curious to see other’s ideas on. From my experience I thought [http://code.google.com/soc/pgsql/about.html PostgreSQL’s SoC projects] all went pretty well. While not everything went into core, all of the mentor surveys indicated that they thought the program was successful. Actually one problem specific to our project was the feature freeze date issue, where 8.2’s feature freeze date was before the end of the SoC program, and core decided against pushing it back. Because of this, 3 of the projects ended up with code that the mentors felt will probably be included in 8.3, but didn’t make the cut for 8.2. (The [http://code.google.com/soc/pgsql/appinfo.html?csaid=F94A1818F46F66FD xlog viewer], XML work, and the Hashing DISTINCT Clause implementation). On the other end were 3 projects that did make it into core, though 1 of those was actually a list of improvements for PhpPgAdmin, so it didn’t have to worry about feature freeze issues. ([http://code.google.com/soc/pgsql/appinfo.html?csaid=DB096D908B948D89 phpPgAdmin improvements], [http://code.google.com/soc/pgsql/appinfo.html?csaid=4E856BAC67297450 enhanced aggregate upport], and ECPG cleanup). The last project ([http://code.google.com/soc/pgsql/appinfo.html?csaid=34B13296DE039A78 Full Disjunctions]) ended with a slightly different fate… upon submittal for inclusion into core, it was decided that the implementation would be too different as a core feature, and so the project now lives on [http://pgfoundry.org/projects/fulldisjunction/ PgFoundry]. It did have a lot of supporters though, enough so that it will probably be mentioned in the upcoming 8.2 press release. Unfortunately my stay will be short, I’m flying back Saturday night right after the conference, so I won’t get a chance to visit any of the [http://pugs.postgresql.org/sfpug/ SoCal gang], but I think it will be nice to get together with other SoC folks and hopefully I’ll pick up some tips to help make the program stronger for the project next year.