photo by Austin Ziegler
I was at Google Mentor Summit this weekend. It was at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. It was really amazing to meet with other FOSS developers.
It took 22 hours to arrive CA but hopefully I was strong enough to directy go to the welcome party. :)
First of all, I’d like to thank Chris DiBona, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, Ellen Ko and any other Googlers who participated to organize such a wonderful summit. I really had a great time.
During the summit, I attended several sessions including Android related ones (which made me to buy a TMobile G1 yesterday!) and Distro Leader’s summit that Donnie (from Gentoo) proposed (Karsten Wade from Fedora, Joe Brockmeier from OpenSuse, Steve McIntyre from Debian showed up) and we talked about how to get introduced more people with Linux. And of course, Sam’s Open Souce Game Development session was one of the greatest ones.
pic. from open source security session
I also led a session called Open Souce Security. It took much more time than I thought (90 minutes instead of 30′). A lot of participants from various level of security showed up– Google Network Security Team Leader, Eugene Teo from Redhat Security Team, developers from Tor project (you can remember Jacob Appelbaum from his Cold Boot Attack Research) and so on. At first minutes, I got really excited because there were a lot of security experts who have much more knowledge and experience than me. :) But the session went quite good and we mostly discussed about tracking vulnerabilities, disclosing security flaws, patches to OSS projects that possibly have security vulnerabilities and criterions of accepting them, and GSoC students’ secure coding.
I’d like to thank some of my friends that I met at the event -in order of appearance :)
* Eugene Teo from Redhat Kernel Security Team. I knew and respect him from OSS security society- it was really nice to meet and talk about security with him.
* Donnie Berkholz from Gentoo. He’s currently Gentoo council member and maintains X.org–which I think is a quite hard job :)
* Sam Lantinga, lead software engineer and leader of the group of gameplay programmers on World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertaintment. *cool* He’s also the creator of fabulous library, SDL. He became one of my closest friends during these two days. I’m really so lucky to meet with him. :)
* Nils Kneuper and Mark de Wever from Wesnoth. We used to know each other with Nils but I totaly forgot that he’ll attend to this event. But thanks God, we met at lunch by chance! :) Mark is also a cool guy from Wesnoth and *i think* he had a great time while watching me when I was drinking *natural* Green Tea (it was the worst thing i’ve ever drunk. ahh.).
* Austin Ziegler, from Ruby Central. He is a cool photographer and ruby person and I am looking forward to see his group girl photos.
* Selena Deckelmann, from PostgreSQL. I always glad to meet with other women in computing. I am looking forward to participate in a WiC project with her.
* Mike Melanson, Justin Ruggles, Reimar Döffinger from ffmpeg team. They were really funny people and we had a great time while Mike was talking about the times that Ismail’s complainings on Turkish support :)
* Alisson Yagi Costa, from Umit. We went to San Francisco and Santa Cruz with him and his words to describe me were quite remarkable :“you’re not normal, but you’re not strange” :)
Of course there are much more people to mention here. I’d like to see all of them in the next summit!
PS#1: There are some photos (the giant anroid, too!) on my Flickr set: Mentor summit, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Stanford, Palo Alto.
PS#2: To Turkish readers: I merged my Turkish blog (and RSS’ also) with this blog address, so from now on all my entries will be in English. Thanks! :)