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Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) Award Ceremony

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You may remember that back in February, Drupal announced that Peter Cawley (Corsix) was chosen as the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) winner for the Drupal project. It turns out that finding a time when the 10 grand prize winners, their parents, and a mentor from each of the 10 participating open source projects were all free was not easy, but we finally got together this week for the official awards ceremony.

We started out on Thursday morning by going to breakfast at an "undisclosed location" which turned out to be the International House of Pancakes (IHOP for short). I believe Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7) and Dmitri Gaskin (dmitrig01) are to blame for making us all think of pancakes whenever we think of GHOP.

After breakfast, we headed to Great America, a nearby amusement park with plenty of roller coasters and such. Being a Thursday, the crowds were not bad at all and we were able to enjoy the rides without waiting in line very much. Hanging out for a day at the amusement park gave the students, mentors, and their parents plenty of time to mingle and get to know one another. I won't name any names, but one of the mothers frequently mentioned that she thought it was very cool that all of the students were talking to one another and getting to be friends. Apparently some people think that us geeks don't like to socialize.

On Friday morning, our bus picked us up and took us to the Mountain View headquarters of Google. I believe I can speak for the others in saying that we were all very much looking forward to this experience. After staring at the semi-live screen of search queries being run at the moment while waiting to check in and get our name badges, we had breakfast and then went on a tour of the campus. After the tour was the award ceremony, and the students were all given trophies to mark their accomplishments. As a side note, I do appreciate that the trophies had some resemblance to the Druplicon.

We ate lunch at the main cafeteria, and then after a few group photos and a trip to the Google gift shop, we settled in for an afternoon of very informative and interesting lectures.

Guido van Rossum started out with a talk on Google AppEngine, a relatively new product that allows one to create a rather large and powerful site without ever needing to worry about the site's infrastructure. Being able to create a very scalable site without needing to worry about configuring the web server or database server would be very nice. Unfortunately, for the moment at least, AppEngine only supports the Python programming language, so no Drupal. However, we were told that additional languages would be supported in the future, though in typical Google style we were not told when this would happen or what languages would be supported.

Next up was Romain Guy, one of the developers of Android, Google's soon-to-be released open source mobile phone operating system. He kept mentioning that the phone he was carrying in his pocket could do this and that, but wouldn't actually take said phone out of his pocket and show us! However, he did go through the process of creating a very simple Android application from scratch, and it does look like a very powerful platform with some very cool features. I spoke with some other Googlers, and though none of them would give me any further details about the phone, all promised that it would be cool.

After taking a short break for GHOPcake, we rejoined for a talk by Jeff Dean, who spoke about Google's infrastructure, including GFS, Bigtable, MapReduce, etc. I'm very impressed by the thought that has gone into the design and how resilient the entire network of systems seems to be.

Our final talk was by Bharat Mediratta and Mike Bland, two members of Google's testing team. Though testing is not the most exciting subject, they did a great job and gave a very insightful and interesting talk about the process they have gone through to try to encourage and train Googlers to write tests with their code. Their story of how "Testing on the toilet" came to be was especially entertaining. I found it very interesting that even at Google, with all of those smart people, getting people to always write tests for their code is not easy. I'm not sure if that's encouraging news for our own push to have complete test coverage for Drupal 7, but at least we're not alone. If only we could put testing newsletters in every Drupal developer's toilet, we might make some great progress. Don't give webchick a key to your home, or it just might happen!

Leslie had pizza delivered to the hotel for dinner Friday night, and we talked as a group about how to improve GHOP, if it were to happen again. Though lots of problems and solutions were discussed, a lot of the discussion focused on how to improve the issue tracker used on the Google side of things, and how to help get more mentors involved within each of the participating groups. In response to the concern with the not-so-functional issue tracking system, the Google Open Source team is working on a new Summer of Code/GHOP system, and it will be completely open source and will run on AppEngine. Google is welcoming any interested parties in our community to help join them in making the tracker awesome, so if you're interested check out the project on the Google code site.

Overall I had a great time and want to thank Google for making GHOP and this trip possible. For any high school age students reading this, I would encourage you to participate in the next GHOP program*. If you're not a student you can still help out by keeping in mind small and discrete tasks that we could use as tasks for future incarnations of GHOP.
* If and when such a program happens.

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