For those who were thinking to apply to GSoC, good news and no more excuses, the student applications open and deadline have been extended by one week. The deadline now is Monday – Jan 7th.
If you are applying, stay tunned to the official calendar and good luck!
The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) March meeting happened at Google’s office in São Paulo. The meeting was attended by about 60 people and we had 5 talks. This was a very special meeting because we had talks from Guido, Alex Martelli, Collin Winter and Cary Hull (all by video conference).
Talks:
The next meeting will be held on May. We will not have a meeting in April because of FISL (Free Software International Forum) that will happen on April 17th, 18th and 19th at Porto Alegre.
Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Rodolpho who organized the meeting.
Well, it’s time for students to apply for Google Summer of Code.
What is GSoC ?
You can read about GSoC in their website, but I will try to resume here what is GSoC.
Google pays you (a student) US$ 4500,00 for three months of work on a free/open source software.
First the organizations apply for GSoC as a mentoring organization. Each organization accepted by Google receive slots and distribute this slots in project ideas.
Then the student find a mentoring organization, choose a project (or propose a new one) and asks for a mentor (applying). The organization will choose the students and then monitor the student work. Note that a student can apply for 20 projects but if approved in more than one he will need to choose only one to work.
The student will receive from Google US$ 500,00 when the program starts, then US$ 2000,00 after a month of work and US$ 2000,00 when the program finishes. Obviously the mentor will check the student process/work and decide if he should receive the money or not.
When the student finishes the program, he receives a GSoC t-shirt and a Google certificate (nice! 
).
Benefits
For students (like me):
For organizations (like Python Software Foundation):
I’m applying for BlueZ, the project idea is simple, build a high-level interface/layer upon python-dbus to provide the services/interfaces offered by BlueZ by D-Bus.
I’ll probably try to apply to OLPC as well.
I’m also applying (maybe too late) for Python Software Foundation to work on PyPy. The project idea is to support CPython 2.5 features and changes missing in PyPy.
For more information in GSoC I recommend watching this screencast by Titus Brown.
That’s all.
The GruPy-SP (São Paulo Python User Group) February meeting was held at SENAI Santos. It was a two-day event, one day for talks and the other for the Python Bug Day.
First day – Feb, 22 – Talks
Luciano Ramalho and Pedro Werneck talked to approximately 140 students, professors and professionals at SENAI Santos.
Luciano talked about Python being used by big companies as a “secret weapon”, he showed some Python code including PyGame and Django examples and interactive sessions using the Python console.
Pedro showed some of the versatility of Python presenting a script that manipulates a device plugged in the computer parallel port, some web apps and a GUI application using Tkinter.
Most of the audience was not familiar to Python and this was their first contact with the language.
Second day – Feb, 23 – Python Bug Day
14 members of the GruPy-SP went to Santos to work on the Python Bug Day.
The sprint started at 10h00 led by Luciano Ramalho and Rodrigo Bernardo Pimentel (RBP). We listed the bugs that we thought we could fix and then started working in pairs. The sprint went until 16h00 and we fixed five bugs.
Thanks to everyone who attended, specially to Sandro Fernandes and Ricardo Guinody who organized this meeting.
Free Software enthusiast, music lover, bike commuter and eventually geocache hunter :)
Python programmer and GNU/Linux user
To reach me: brunogola@gmail.com or #python-br @ irc.freenode.org :-)
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