… and I still cannot believe it.
Google Summer of Code is an inititative by Google to join Open Source organizations, and CS students, so that new talent can get a taste of a professional working environment, while developing some (hopefully) valuable project for the organizations.
I applied for the program this year, inspired by my friend and C++ savant Manu Sánchez, and I got in 🙂
ScummVM
ScummVM is an organization dedicated to the preservation of old adventure games. I choose to apply to ScummVM for various reasons:
First, there’s the community. From the moment I walked into the IRC, I found one of the most welcoming and understanding communities I’ve been to. So much so that, even though it soon became obvious that I was far from “knowing how to C++”, they helped me set up a non-supported dev environment through 5 hours of trial and error.
Second, the technical challenges. ScummVM has to support several… um… unusual devices at once (NDS and PS2…), and thus the org has it’s own implementation of basically everything STL (List, String…), which is obviously very, very interesting to look at. This, coupled with the challenge of understanding ancient game code and some high level JavaScript, is a very stimulating challenge. All in all, it’s an amazing opportunity to “learn how to C++”.
My Project
There is not much to say about my project that hasn’t been said elsewhere, so I’ll just say that it entails a good deal of reading other people’s code, and butchering it to do some software design black magic with it 🙂
So, let’s do this
I believe there is nothing else to say, except that I’m really eager to begin this amazing experience, and that I’ll give it my best.