Devin represents Sugar Labs at GSoc Mentor Summit

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Music Blocks co-creator, Devin Ulibarri, represented Sugar Labs, a member org of Software Freedom Conservancy, at this year’s Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit at Google Headquarters in California. The following post is Devin’s reflections upon the summit.

Hi, this is Devin. I have just returned from the 2018 GSoC mentor summit. It was my first time to attend the summit although I have mentored for GSoC every year since 2015, which is the year that Walter Bender, Yash Khandelwal (GSoC student for that year), and I began development on Music Blocks. I thought that this year would be a good year to attend with the intention to represent the work of SugarLabs and make connections with others in the free software community. I was joined by fellow GSoC mentor, Jaskirat (shown in the picture above). A third mentor was planned to attend but was not able to because of a family emergency.

The mentor summit is hosted by Google at one of their office buildings at their Headquarters in Sunnyvale California. We were greeted by Google’s Open Source team who are all friendly and professional. There were more than 300 mentors from various organizations in attendance, including Karen Sandler of Software Freedom Conservancy.

The best part of attending the summit was the opportunity to meet with mentors from other organizations. I enjoyed my conversations with everyone that I met at the summit, but since Music Blocks is about music (and since I am a music teacher) I will outline some of the conversations I had with mentors from MuseScore.

MuseScore mentors presented their work from this year’s GSoC that introduces a feature for users to see changes to scores. It is very interesting as one can see a history of changes on the score itself. They newer notes would be highlighted in green (as new) on a copy of the score on the right side of the screen and the older notes would be highlighted in red (as deleted) on a copy of the score on the left side of the screen. Those familiar with git version control will notice the parallel with this method. SugarLabs is also currently working on a git backend for Turtle JS, Music Blocks (which is a fork of Turtle JS), and Journal.

The MuseScore mentors and I also discussed the possibility of exporting to (and importing from) MusicXML, which is a standard for music notation utilized by different music notation software. As a result of this conversation, I brought this idea back to the Music Blocks team and we created a feature request on GitHub for MusicXML export.

  • Devin’s lightning talk for GSoC summit.
  • Devin shares the accomplishments of one of the year’s GSoC interns for SugarLabs.

For the second day of lightning talks I presented the work on temperament by one of our students, Riya. The full PDF of the slideshow is available at https://owncloud.libretools.com/index.php/s/A7j3gZyxntuItRf We are very proud of our students’ work and Riya’s work for GSoC was exceptional for such a challenging project.

Many thanks again to the SugarLabs community and Software Freedom Conservancy for the opportunity to attend the summit and represent SugarLabs and the work we do.