Drupal SoC student introduction post...

Hi Drupal community! I'm Jakob a.k.a. jpetso, and I have the pleasure of being one of the students selected by the prominent Drupal mentors. Needless to say, it's both an honor and a challenge to do a Summer of Code project for Drupal, and I'm totally looking forward to getting in touch with all of you community people!

I'm a computer science student from Austria (currently going for an MSc), 23 years old, phenomenally bad with time management, and equipped with a strong passion for music and open source. When I say open source, I actually mean Free software, because the philosophy aspect of it is actually what keeps motivating me. For Drupal, I guess that would translate to something like "helping people to build their own sites, enabling them to keep their data for themselves, making the web a better place". Idealistic stuff like that.

I found Drupal through my other favorite open source project, the KDE desktop, where it still runs the developer blog site (beware! old version), the promotion community site, and was mentioned a few times for being a cleanly architectured, simple-to-administrate web framework, so I tried it out and was not disappointed. My first experiences with Drupal range back to the last days of 4.6, and boy has it improved since then :D

So I've been gradually diving deeper into open source for about four years, and into Drupal for about one and a half, while playing piano in a couple of bands, helping out the local firefighters, occasionally playing a bit of tennis, and trying to balance the time for social life against studies and open source contributing.

Since January, I'm short-time employed by the great but widely unknown Austrian Drupal startup firm Pro.Karriere, where I can work on and with Drupal while being paid for it (yay!). That means that time is still harder to manage than before, and that the focus of my open source work has shifted from KDE to Drupal, but on the other hand, it's hard to top the combination of fine code and a great team! So now I'm working together with people like our local Drupal guru fago or mh86 who also got accepted for a Summer of Code project. Best of all, Pro.Karriere has sponsored a flight to this year's DrupalCon in Barcelona for our whole development team, so some of us might meet there in person.

Doing stuff the right way is important to me. That often implies that I need more time to accomplish things that could have been done faster (applies to code just as well as to my studies), but what I get done is usually something that I can feel proud of. Doing stuff the right way is also the reason why I prefer KDE/Qt (very cool C++ desktop platform) and Drupal (very cool PHP web platform) over less well-designed projects like GNOME or Joomla: they might bring more comfort and bling today, but spending time on enjoyable code (and on Free software, for that matter) feels like a good investment in the future of the web, the desktop, or computing and society in general.

My Summer of Code project, RCS abstraction for the Project module, falls into the same category of "doing stuff the right way". CVS, as useful as it is, feels very awkward to me, especially since Subversion came out and fixed all the countless shortcomings that CVS brings. Now I'm not the kind of guy to ask the already overworked drupal.org admins to switch to a not so old-fashioned revision control system, but in the long run it would certainly be nice to have something like Subversion, Git, Bazaar, or whatever proves to be a good fit for the Drupal community. So what I'll be doing during the Summer of Code is decoupling the Project module (which is the thing that runs all the project, issue and source code management on drupal.org) from CVS, to make a switch possible at all.

I guess that's not too bad for a short (ahem?) introduction. One thing that I probably haven't mentioned yet is that I tend to write unreasonably long postings, especially when bed would also be a good option ;D ...thus, good night y'all.

My name is Balazs Dianiska. I am coming from a field not so common in OS development I suppose: I study physics, more specifically my thesis is on the field of astropysics. I am attending an old-style 5 year long MSc studies, mainly in Budapest, Hungary, though I spent last year with Erasmus at the cool institute of Universiteit van Amsterdam and was doing research at Utrecht University, occasionally placed in the next-door building, SRON. I loved both cities very much.

My usual work is not web-related, this is my hobby. I found that programming in C, writing astrophysical simulations somehow gives me a great advantage when starting to learn other programming languages, so I started to learn PHP and webdesign couple of years ago. I found building webpages to be a great fun, though am not very talented on the design part (but i still try), the functionalities, putting together something that works, to create something became a strong passion to me. I started to write my own CMS, but after the very primitive first include based version i never moved to database (only the database.inc.php was finished), because I met Drupal, and realized its much more cost-effective to learn this than do it on my own.

Though I applied to Drupal, and GSoC last year too, this year I actually took the application seriously, and was really happy to be chosen. I am going to work on a general drawing API and SVG support for Drupal - this will allow developing a wide range of graphical applications, from SVG in theming to graphs and so on (for more ideas check the graphing & svg group, feel free to share your visions). When applying I was not familiar with Drupal coding, only from the user side. Last year I built a website called marvin, to gain experience and learn.

When not in front of the computer, or at school I do various things (never could settle for one activity at a time). I am an organizer of the International Astronomical Youth Camp, where I usually lead astronomical working groups. I am very interested in space research, with my university team we got accepted at and attended the ESA Student Parabolic Flight. Next year after I finished my studies I am going to apply for a PhD somewhere in Western Europe, and hope to be able to work in astrophysics for a bit longer.

I am Gartheeban Ganeshapillai alias Theebgar….

I was born in a famous, but currently war torn town Jaffna, in the northern peninsula of the country, and later moved to Colombo – capital city of Sri Lanka. I have many interests which I will describe below, however, I got fascinated using a computer / writing programs when I was 12 years old (in 1997) and started learning, with Visual Basic, HTML, C and few other languages, mainly due to the fact that I didn’t have a computer to try at home. Bought a P3 in 1999 since then I have been flying, however I turned my wings to another field of interest – electronics and intelligent systems when I move to the uni. Well a year back I got a 3 GHz.

I am currently reading for my first degree in Electronics and Telecommunication at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Level 3(5th semester) starts in two months and at the end (in OCT) I gotta move to industry for my mandatory internship (hope to find one in US or Europe). Apart from the course curriculum I am mainly interested in intelligent (in my terms semi-intelligent) systems with tele-control. Well I think movies play a big role in ppl’s attention (I got my goal from COP – central operating system appeared in X-Files). Well I understand my field and interests are far away from what I m doing here now – programming, developing web services. They are kinda leisure time activities, however, they benefited me in many ways – to complete my course works, programming robots, and setting up networks and scheduling and they are paying me in my part time jobs.

My interests are manifold.

First those are making others think that I am bit nerd:
Drawing, water color painting,
Writing - poems, essays, journals and papers (required my degree course ;-))
Reading – fictions (Dan brown, Jeffry Archer, Paulo Coelho, Dan Brown Stories Sydney Sheldon's and Len Dighton are my favorite authors), non-fictions (mainly psychology related or about personal management – Stephen R Covey’s habits series ;-) ), technical journals and encyclopedia (I love that ;-) )
Programming – yeup that is one of my interest, algorithms and mathematical puzzles.
Physics – Since my advanced level in School I fall in love with physics and currently I am taking classes to Advance Level students in physics
Then General Interests:
Watching movies (English, French, Chinese), tv series (Prison break, lost, OC, 24, Alias and Friends) and cartoons / animated movies (Finding nemo, Madagascar)
Finally some rocking interests:
Playing table tennis, swimming, going off country trips, hiking, chatting with friends (making friends globally), and hanging out with them.

Well you might wonder how the heck I get enough time; well… currently I don’t have any GF ;-)

In Drupal and For Drupal
When I was building a site for a society (about 3months back), I came across Drupal and gave a try, got fascinated and moved my whole site to Drupal. A drawback I had when used Drupal for the site was completing link automatically. When I saw Drupal in GSoC I applied and got selected.

My project has taken a different shape (thanks to Dan and others for valuable advices) from my original proposal which I have submitted here. However the main idea is to implement a module that automatically finds and completes the links for key terms in the content with minimal user interaction/ convenient way.

To get in touch and share experiences
Yahoo: theebgar@yahoo.com
Gmail: garthee@gmail.ocm
MSN: garthee@hotmail.com
Web / blogging: www.theebgar.phpnet.us/drupal

Unlike most other Drupal GSoC students, I am not new to the Drupal community (heh, being a core comitter for Drupal 6 tells a lot of things). My hands will all be full this summer with Drupal stuff, so my main reason of application for Google SoC was to get some new features and tools for interface translators into the Drupal tool set (which would greatly help the Hungarian translation team too), rather then getting to know a new community.

Anyway, I am a 26 year old Hungarian just writing my MsC thesis on international web applications (Drupal being the implementation target), so I will hopefully finish my university in the middle of SoC. I am tied to open source in many ways, using various Linux distributions on my desktop for four years now, and taking part in the PHP community (by leading the documentation team and the web site team for a few years). Had speeches at a few conferences around Europe about PHP stuff and Drupal. Was a key organizer of a few big (100 to 400 attendees) conferences in Hungary about PHP, general web technologies and Drupal. Done technical editing of several Hungarian books (PHP, AJAX), even contributed to the 18th chapter of the Pro Drupal Book. Occasionally teaching PHP and Drupal courses at an education company. I started weblabor.hu (which is an "open content" community for Hungarian web developers) in 1999, and we are expanding ever since. I was exposed to Drupal, when we needed a system to upgrade to, allowing us to expand. Drupal.hu was spin off from Weblabor.hu, and we were able to gather an active (albeit small) community around there. Maybe it is understandable that I did not have the time to finish university earlier. :)

I live my personal life with my wonderful girlfriend, with whom we love to go out swimming to soften daily stress. My passion for acting and singing dates back to elementary school. I was participating in stage performances of different kinds since then, in recent years, played in key roles in musicals as an amateur actor. Also finding a lot of pleasure in karaoke and grill food :)

Greetings! I'm Max Khitrov, was born and raised in Moscow, Russia, moved to US in 1996 and currently live in Maryland. I'm a CS major at the University of Maryland, College Park, expecting to graduate in the spring of next year. I am new to the Drupal community, but I've done plenty of PHP development for other projects as well as my own in the past.

I started writing some rudimentary programs back at Moscow on computers that my dad put together. Once we moved to US I got myself a TI-83 (and later a TI-89) calculator and those served as the starting point for my programming education. Sadly, when I made it to High School my first real CS course apparently deemed it essential to introduce the knowledge of Visual Basic 6 to my repertoire, and I spent three years after that trying to undo the damage ;)

In the past, I've always preferred low-level programming in C and ASM, and was especially proud of my 13h VGA graphics library :). Last few years forced me to do a lot of web development for my job, so gradually learned PHP, JavaScript, MySQL and the rest of it. Now I don't really care what I'm using to write software, as long as the task is interesting (and my current data structures course, for which I need to finish my B-Tree and PM{1,2,3} Quadtree in Java for tomorrow sadly does not fall into the "interesting" category, but what can you do).

Interests outside of computers... Well, last summer I started pilot training to get my Private Pilot Certificate for single-engine land aircraft. I did my first solo, and one cross-country. Then the classes started, so I put the rest of it off until this summer. Hopefully I will find some time (and money) to finish the training. After that I'm planning on getting into aerobatics, but that probably will not happen for a few more years.

What else? Ah, yes, my project - I'll be writing a jabber IM module for Drupal in hopes of transferring some of the communications away from e-mail. You can read more about it at the original proposal page as well as my post in the SoC 2007 group.

Hi! My name is Christopher Bradford (call me Chris or Christopher, it doesn't matter). I am twenty years old and I live in Richmond, Virginia. I am majoring in Information Systems with a concentration in Network Management, as well as a minor in Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Most recently I have worked on the VCU Libraries website, completely redesigning the look and feel without having to update every page. This required extensive use of XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and ColdFusion. I think one of the most interesting aspects has been the use of JavaScript and XML to vary the different page elements on each visit. Also the use of ColdFusion on their servers presented a challenge as I did not know ColdFusion before I started work there. Anyone not familiar with ColdFusion, a large portion of the language is tag based. This was a big change over the script based programming i was used to with PHP.

Sometime during my sophmore year in High School I was out "sick" from school. I decided to teach myself PHP and MySQL due to boredom and hearing of its "amazingness" from a friend. I already knew HTML and javascript, but once I saw how dynamic a site could be with PHP and MySQL I was hooked. I started out slow with simple tutorials, but now I am writing web-based conference management system for the VCU Model United Nations Club.

Lately I have lost sight of my "hobbies" due to finals and a rediculously huge final project. Before this semester I spent time programming and being active in the Model United Nation club at VCU. I mostly spend my extra time with my fiancée Kriston. Also I am a fan of web-comics, I enjoy finding new ones and going through their archives and starting from the beginning (these usually span many years).

My proposal covers the creation of a BitTorrent module. The goal is to have an option of "seeding" a file uploaded through the Drupal interface. Another option that might make it in to the final proposal is server-side seeding. Once the user uploads a file the web-server would provide the initial seed. So far the community has expressed interest in a BitTorrent tracker, and I aim to not disappoint. I am really looking forward to writing the tracker and integrating it into Drupal environment.

Hi!

I’m Matthias Hutterer. I was born in 1986 in a small village in Austria. After school I went to Vienna for studying computer science and economics. It's my second year on the Technical University of Vienna and next year I hope, I'll can finish my bachelor.
My first experiences with programming were in school with about 17 years. I did some smaller projects in PHP and MySQL.
In my student dorm in Vienna I got to know fago. He asked me to help him with programming in Drupal for a small Austrian company. I was absolutely new to Drupal and had only few experiences in programming. The first hours where really hard, the first small tasks did really took a lot of time, but after same time I got familiar with the basic concepts of Drupal and from this time on I’m really a big fan of Drupal.
Last summer I started contributing my own modules. My modules offer additional fields to the Content Construction Kit. At the moment I'm working on the Content Taxonomy module, which allows you to create form fields in CCK for referencing taxonomy term. It’s one of my bigger projects and I really spent a lot of time with this module.
While working on the Content Taxonomy I got to know a lot about the taxonomy system and yes, the taxonomy system is really one of the greatest features of Drupal :). The only thing I don't like is the administration interface for managing terms. It’s okay for managing a small amount of terms, but with an increasing number of terms it gets hard to use.
This fact brought me into mind to improve the taxonomy administration interface and to write a proposal for GSoC. My plan is to write a new module, which provides a complete re-designed admin interface for managing terms, a so called Taxonomy Manager.

as much as i hate doing these kind of things, i'll go ahead and get it over with to save webchick from having to send out another round of reminders.

my name is andrew morton. i'm 26 and working on an undergraduate degree in computer science at portland state university in portland oregon. i've been working with drupal for over a year. i'd been working at at the college radio station, KPSU and gone through two versions of a home brewed CMS before hearing about drupal at the local PHP users's group meeting. i compared it to joomla/mambo and high quality of documentation for module development made it easy to pick Drupal.

i got a CVS account and refactored all my custom radio station scheduling code into what is now the station module. in the process i pretty much re-wrote the audio module. since then, i started the flickr module (i'd actually put in a SoC proposal to do it last year but it was done at the last minute and i wasn't accepted), and done some work on the image module.

i decided that this time around i wanted to put in an soc proposal that was directed at giving something back to drupal.org. dww's project quality metrics seemed like the perfect choice, the proposal practically wrote itself in two hours. i was very excited to be selected and based on all the other responses in this thread it looks like i'm in excellent company.

if you care to know any more about me, you can listen to the interview i did with robert douglass for the lullabot podcast: http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/drupal_podcast_no_37

Hi all. As stated above my name is Blake Lucchesi, I'm an Electrical Engineering Major at the University of California, Irvine. I've been working with Drupal for nearly two years now. I started out developing a few small sites at my old work (a web hosting company located near my school) where I designed a few sites for families, the goal being to have a public site to post their photos and share announcements with other friends and family. During this time I also put together a small network of sites for some local Boys and Girls Club offices in Orange County.

As of now I currently have a job at a clothing retailer Blankstyle Clothing and Accessories. My job is to completely revamp their site with better ecommerce support and content publishing. Needless to say I'm using Drupal. I'm currently writing a coupon module to compliment the great new Ubercart Ecommerce module, it will be made public once finished.

As for my part in the Summer of Code, my plan is provide the community with a module to provide better search results for searches performed on Drupal sites. My goal is to use various fuzzy search engine techniques to allow site visitors to find relevant results on Drupal websites. Most specifically I hope to use a process called Weighted Pattern Morphing, which allows for synonym matching and morph creating. You can read more about the topic in the various articles I've posted to my blog, along with a somewhat basic comparison of some popular fuzzy search techniques.

And I was at Yahoo!'s OSCMS, and I will tell anyone, that if you get a chance to go to a meet up, even a local one. IT IS WORTH THE TIME. There really is no substitute for one on one conversation and hands on presentation of knowledge.

That's all for now, but I look forward to getting to know others in the community and becoming an active contributor to the project.

hi guys,

i'm a bit late with my introduction, as i had my mid-term tests last week. (3 of them, actually). anyway, here i am!

My name is Jakob, I'm from Vienna, Austria and currently studying at Vienna University of Economics. before that, i received a master of laws degree from Vienna University. and for more than 10 years, i'm into linux and networking. to make a living, i work for an isp part-time.
i'm pretty busy most of the time since i have so many interests, they just don't fit into a 24-hour day. but i'm trying :)

in my freetime, besides computers and internet, i love sports. like practically all austrians, i'm a good skier. i also like running and climbing. i guess i'd also like football, if i just were a bit better at it :-)

as far as drupal is concerned, i'm rather new to the community, but this project instantly intrigued me: i'm integrating drupal's ecommerce store with ebay's API. i think that's a good move and will get drupal a lot of new (corporate) users. at least i hope so!

well that's what i have to tell about me! any questions? you're welcome to contact me :)

kudos to all of you gsoc ppl,
Jakob