I’m personally a big fan of code reviews. Proper code review habits can really improve the quality of a code base and help you find bugs or design problems in your project. I also believe that a good tools for code review can improve developers life, so I’m always glad to see new tools or integrations in that field. If you don’t know what code reviews are, please have a look at wikipedia’s description here.

I think it’s already 5 days when Google Project Hosting integrated Code Reviews. I found out yesterday when I watched last commits of the open source projects I’m tracking. When I selected a commit I was surprised to see “Start a code review” block on the right side.

This wiki page on the Google Project Hosting (GPH) support wiki describes in more details how to do code reviews on GPH.

I have been writing about Mondrian (Google’s internal code review tool written by Guido van Rossum) way back.  When Google AppEngine was released, Guido ported most of the functionality of Mondrian into new open source project called Rietveld – Code Review application running on App Engine (Article about Rietveld on AppEngine webpage). Many open source projects are using Rietveld public instance already, you can check that out just by looking into repositories list. Some project use they own instance of Retvield and limits access to code reviews using separate domain with Google Apps for your domain.

You can read more about background behind Rietveld here and how to start code reviews with Rietveld here.

Rietveld is pre-commit code review tool and Google Project Hosting Code Review implementation is post-commit. That is probably the biggest difference between those two. All the shortcuts used in GPH are mostly based on what’s available in Rietveld. So now we have both pre-commit and post-commit code review tools and both are from Google.

Some of the implemented features include review of the whole commit and also writing of in-line comments (in a nice diff view) for particular lines of code.

Configuration of your project code reviews can be found in Administer->Source tab.

Summarizing, we just got another great tool for doing code reviews and it’s nicely integrated into Google Project Hosting. It also means that open source projects don’t have to use ReviewBoard or Rietveld and can start doing code reviews right away if they use SVN repository from Google Project Hosting. If you’re project is using public SVN, but you are more interested in pre-commit code reviews, you can always use Rietveld public instance on Google AppEngine and add your SVN repository to the Rietveld repository list. It’s that simple :-)

We are happy to announce that Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group) has been selected for mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2008.

Want to write open source code? Want to make money? Want to do both? Join NUI Group for this year edition of Google Summer of Code.

If you’re a student and maybe even a NUI Group member check out our projects ideas wiki page. Prepare your project proposal and apply ! Google is offering successful student contributors a 4500 USD stipend, enabling them to focus on their coding projects for three months. And this year you can code with NUI Group :-)

We are looking for your participation and for innovative and creative projects proposal. If you don’t find interesting project at our ideas webpage feel free to send us your own project idea. Starting from today (March 17th) students have a week (till March 24th) to discuss projects ideas with mentors from NUI Group. The student application period begins Monday, March 24th 2008 and ends Monday, March 31st 2008.

If you don’t know what GSoC is, here is a little description from GSoC FAQ:

“Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year. If are feeling nostalgic or are interested in learning more about the projects we have worked with in the past, check out the 2006 and 2007 program pages.”

You can learn more about Google Summer of Code at http://code.google.com/soc , remember to check out programs FAQ before you ask questions.

Also here is the latest blog post at Google Open Source blog about GSoC: Meet your mentors.

Big request to NUI Group member: Spread the word about NUI Group participation in GSoC 2008 on your blogs :-)

Leslie Hawthorn has just announced Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the OSDC open source conference in Australia. What is GHOP ? It’s a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, just like Google Summer of Code does for university students. Thanks to Google now even pre-university students can be involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research. It’s a great opportunity for students in highschools to dive in open source software development and get new valuable experience.

For the contest, Google selected 10 Open Source projects which you might work for: The Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Each of selected projects (mentoring organizations) will provide a list of tasks the relevant project needs help with. Students choose on which particular task they want to work on and submit their work according to the instructions for each task. Students are eligible to win cash prizes and nice GHOP t-shirts, grand prize winners will get a nice free trip to Googleplex in Mountain View :-)

The contest started today and finishes January 22.

Full details are available at the Google Highly Open Participation Contest page

Post at Google Summer of Code blog can be found here.

You can also check out the contest FAQs for some more information and visit GHOP discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.

While being at WWDC I took a Monday off just after Keynote and drove to Googleplex in Mountain View. I had a pleasure to visit Google and meet with Leslie Hawthorn Project Manager for Google Summer of Code :-) I had a really great time there. Thank You for that opportunity. After a tour and lunch I had a Tech Talk: Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch. Projects I was talking about are both my Google Summer of Code projects: MacLibre GSoC 2006 & OpenTouch GSoC 2007. After tech talk I was interviewed by Leslie for Google Summer of Code podcast :-) Here are some photos that I took at Googleplex :-)

Post about my Tech Talk and Podcast Interview at Google Summer of Code blog

My Tech Talk: Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch at Google Video

Direct link to podcast interview in mp3 format

My presentation in pdf format at Google Summer of Code discuss group

I got accepted for Google Summer of Code 2007 :-) It’s my second summer with Google and WinLibre mentoring organization and I’m really excited about it. My project is called OpenTouch and it is an open source framework for multimodal input devices like for example multitouch screen I’m working on right now. Full proposal of my project can downloaded from here.