Boston and Things
Saturday, May 16th, 2009I figured I would take a minute to talk about my experience in Boston last weekend. Qt and the KDE organization brought all the North American GSOC students to Boston for coding sprint. It was quite the mix of fun and work.
The hassle of getting stuck at customs for an hour and half and then missing both my flight and connection left a sour taste in my mouth last Friday. Finally getting to meet my fellow GSOC students and sitting down for some crab cakes quickly remedied that. Shortly after getting settled in, we all headed to check out the new Star Trek movie on IMAX and it was a blast! In between I got to familiarize myself with a lot of the other interesting GSOC projects going on this year. Pretty much every major component of KDE was represented in Boston.
MIT! We were hacking in this same building!
Saturday and Sunday were almost non-stop hacking sessions. The Kendall Hotel that we were put up in was literally across the street from MIT so naturally MIT housed us for our coding marathons. Of course, when I say non-stop hacking sessions, I mean non-stop with the exception of eating pizza, going for coffee, and exploring the MIT campus. Nonetheless, most people were pretty focused on getting things done. With a little help, I was able to configure and setup Qt Creator to work with my project. It is quite a fantastic IDE and will definitely suite the cross-platform development nature of this project. It also makes things easy for me, a Linux command line beginner who was birthed in the Windows environment. What can I say? I’ll take an effective UI over the command line any day! I would have liked to get more work done but at some point in the middle of the day, I somehow managed to completely destroy my OpenSUSE installation. It took me a while to get things back online, but when I finally did, I was able to get some more hacking done and get all my tools setup.
MIT's Stata Center was across the street!
Saturday night dinner at an Indian restaurant followed by ice cream at J.P. Licks was amazing. Sunday wrapped down pretty quick since most people had flights heading back Sunday evening. I decided to stay an extra night, check out the city, and do a little shopping. I also managed to sneak in a trip to Legal Seafood where I pounded back all the shrimp I could handle. If you are a sneaker head and are ever in Boston, you definately need to check out Bodega on Clearway Street. The store has a false front that looks like some old, broken down, corner store. A secret entrance behind a vending machine reveals a super cool boutique with some sweet clothes and sneaker collections. Definately worth checking out! I know I bought more than one pair of shoes there…
Bodega shoe store. There's a hidden store behind the vending machine!
I had a great time in Boston. It was super cool to meet other developers in person and work together. You get some extra benefits from working with other developers in person as well, like realizing Qt is pronounced “cute” rather than “cue-tee”. I stole a couple of pictures of the group from Marcus Hanwell, a KDE developer working on Avogadro, who was there as a mentor. I also want to thank Jeff Mitchell for hosting us, showing us around town, organizing fun activities, and making countless trips to the airport! I hope Qt and KDE continue to do this in future years as it is an amazing way to lure new developers into becoming active members in the community.
The team hacking away. Photo courtesy of Marcus Hanwell.
Fueled purely on sugar and caffeine, the team is still hacking away!
Group shot of the KDE GSOC 2009 crew. Photo courtesy of Marcus Hanwell.
Shout out to all my fellow KDE GSOC students! Wish you all the best. I’ll try to get all their blogs linked up here so you can follow their progress too.
