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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!