On the weekend of October 13, for the first time since 2019, participants gathered in person for the 2023 Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit in Sunnyvale, California. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend as a mentor and org admin for the FreeCAD project, so thanks to those involved, of course including Google, as well as the FPA.
A great deal of what Yorik wrote in 2017 was still true in terms of the structure of the event, so I won’t repeat those details. As an “unconference”, the event provided plenty of opportunity for spontaneous discussion and activity, although there were were recurring themes, chiefly the problem of funding open source and finding & keeping contributors. At a meta level, though, one of the most frequent things I observed was the difficulty of explaining your niche. With so many projects represented at the event, spanning programming languages and tech ecosystems, you’re lucky if the person you’re having a conversation with has even heard of your project. However, because of the event’s demographics, you’re almost guaranteed that other person will be able to follow a thorough explanation and even come out the other side with some unique insight or germane question. There’s an art to navigating that give-and-take, and there were certainly some experts there. Besides practicing it myself, I observed others having their hand at it, too, enough so that I picked up a sort of ineffable lesson over the weekend on the topic of communication.
In other words, the high bandwidth of in-person events can offer something very hard to replicate.
Besides that, one of my favorite patterns of discussion during the weekend was being able to share appreciation to those who work on projects I use myself. In the process of doing so, and sharing our favorite parts, there were several times where someone had an “aha” moment and learned a new use for an old tool. To give an example, Python has a library for symbolic mathematics, SymPy, and while talking to someone with that project, I mentioned how it has a great continuum mechanics module which can be used for solving beam bending (homework) problems and producing shear & moment diagrams that are otherwise tedious to do by hand. A civil engineering professor heard this and mentioned possibly adapting it for his teaching. Now that’s a magic moment!
