My Summer of Code Part 2 - Mylyn at CampusParty

After two exciting days of CampusParty I woke up at 5 pm on Friday which left me enough time to recap the slides before my talk about building a Trac connector for Mylyn. This was my Summer of Code project in 2006 which got me an invitation to this conference in Valencia to share my experiences.

I was delighted that although this was the fourth presentation about Summer of Code that most chairs were taken when I started my presentation. About five people raised there hands when I asked who had used Eclipse before and except for Kai, who is also a Summer of Coder, no one had heard of Mylyn giving me a chance to impress the audience with its features. Mylyn is a task-focused UI that reduces information overload by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse. Mylyn monitors the work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand and uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information.

Prior to my Summer of Code project Mylyn supported Bugzilla and JIRA repositories. The most requested feature enhancement was a connector for Trac, a web-based issue tracking system with an integrated wiki, which I implemented as my Summer of Code project. I proposed the project because I personally wanted to have Trac tasks integrated with Eclipse but it was great to work on a feature that had a large interest in the community as well. It gave me early feedback and made the experience all the more rewarding. By the end of the summer I had become addicted to the project and I am now a Mylyn committer maintaining the Trac component which has become part of the standard distribution. I also help out mentoring one of the three Summer of Code students that we have for the project this year which is as much fun as being a student!

Laurens who developed SITEman for Joomla as his Summer of Code project in 2006 approached me after my talk to discuss Mylyn integration with J!Code which is an Eclipse-based IDE for Joomla. It is awesome to meet other Summer of Coders at an event like CampusParty to exchange ideas and to socialize.

Google's Summer of Code provides a fantastic framework for doing open-source development. Each student has a mentor who provides guidance which makes it much easier to get started even with little previous experience. I have met many great people through the program and have had many opportunities like visiting a Google office or going to conferences. I hope that the Summer of Code presentations at CampusParty have encouraged more students from Spain to apply for next year's program!