Author Archives: Eilidh

Get into open source with GSoC 2012

Posted on by Eilidh
3

Student applications for Google Summer of Code 2012 will be open very soon. After an extremely enjoyable and rewarding experience with the program last year, I feel it’s my duty to student programmers to get the word out. So, here’s why you should apply.

You get paid to work on open source software. I became a long time user, first time contributor early last year. Looking to give something back, I attempted a LibreOffice Easy Hack. In a case of fantastic timing, they announced their involvement in GSoC a week or so later and I got in touch. The end result was a whole new open source library. I had an amazing experience working with LibreOffice but it’s ideal to choose a project that’s personally useful. GSoC doesn’t require that you’re an open source evangelist but if you are, it’s a strong argument for applying.

It’s fantastic experience working on a large project. I feel I learned more during those three months than during my undergraduate degree course. I have to say that I never particularly enjoyed groupwork at university but it’s completely different if you’re working with smart, motivated individuals who’re there either because they want to be or because they’re paid to be (quite often both). As a nice bonus, it’s great work experience and has essentially led me to my dream job. I’m not sure if that’s a typical result, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have it on your CV or resume.

You meet some of the smartest, most awesome people (not all of them programmers). I think this is my favourite outcome. I’ve met people from all over the world with an assortment of beliefs, opinions and backgrounds. My experience was that some of the best hackers and coolest people (no, seriously!) hang around open source communities.

Applying isn’t difficult, just choose a participating open source organisation or two and do a little research into the suggested projects before getting in touch with them. Good luck!

LibreOffice Conference 2011

Posted on by Eilidh
4

I’ve been home a week from the LibreOffice Conference in Paris and from a personal point of view, it was a huge success.

First of all, here are my slides from the short talk I gave about what we achieved with libvisio over the duration of Google Summer of Code. There is still work to be done but once end-user feedback starts coming in, we can sand down any rough edges.

The conference was a lot of fun, particularly the company. I had the pleasure of meeting the rest of the libvisio team, Fridrich Strba and Valek Filippov, who looked out for me the whole time I was there. I’m sure the Paris pickpockets are still cursing their names.

I also have to admit to being a little starstruck at meeting all the fantastic hackers whose work I have made so much use of. The LibreOffice team were a diverse, interesting and kind bunch who put up with my incessant (well-meaning) questions with good grace and gave me plenty to think about on coding, the universe and everything.

It was wonderful to be surrounded by programmers and Linux users without the geekier-than-thou attitude. Despite being younger (and greener) than most and female unlike many (with a few notable exceptions), I chatted away to my fellow hackers without once feeling patronised.

Finally, I’m staying out of the whole political situation – I started coding with LibreOffice for pragmatic reasons (I could get the code easily, Easy Hacks make getting to know the project simpler and LibreOffice was part of GSoC ’11). However, I think the conference really confirmed for me that as important as the code base is, the community that surrounds a project this size is as vital. Without their helpful, inclusive approach, I’d have found contributing to an open source project of that magnitude an insurmountable task.

So here’s to another year!

Progress with gradient fills

Posted on by Eilidh
4

So, I have finally made progress that isn’t so ground-breaking that my mentor wants to write about it but is big enough that certain people will stop making fun of my empty blog. So, frob (his wonderfully useful work can be found here), I hope you’re happy.

I’ve been working on shapes, lines and their properties, most recently on fills. Here’s how it’s going so far (Visio document on top, my output below).

Thanks to frob for the image, plus animated gif.

A few technical details for those who care: Visio draws shapes (including rectangles) as individual lines and before they can be filled, so we have to manually detect whether or not it’s a closed polygon. At the moment, we simply take the first point and compare it to the last point and make sure there are no gaps in between. It works for most simple cases but since when are things ever truly simple when reverse engineering?

You may also notice a difference between how gradients 31-34 are drawn in Visio vs my output. There’s no direct equivalent of this type of square gradient that I know of in the SVG or ODG specifications, so we’re approximating it. I have a whole new appreciation of slight imperfections when porting documents to different formats.

In the time it has taken to write this, I’ve already found that some of what I’ve written about will change. This is why I’m a programmer not a blogger ;)