We are thrilled to announce the selection of 8 contributors to work with us for this year’s Google Summer of Code program!
MetaBrainz received many great applications this year. Selecting the final contributors was tough and involved deliberating various factors – what these contributors did right is getting in early, engaging with our community, presenting specific and detailed proposals, and proving excellent communication skills and the ability to integrate our feedback back into their proposals.
Thank you to all contributors who submitted a proposal with us!
Hi, I am David Kellner (aka kellnerd), an electrical engineering student from Germany, who has finally found the time to participate in Summer of Code after four years of contributing data, bug reports and a bit of code to MetaBrainz projects (mostly to MusicBrainz and related tools such as userscripts).
Although I had mostly worked with MusicBrainz so far, I decided to apply for the BookBrainz importer project as I was already familiar with the underlying JavaScript technology and saw the huge potential of the idea to transform and import external datasets into the cleverly designed BookBrainz database schema.
My proposed project was accepted by the MetaBrainz team and I have been working on it for the last six months under the mentorship of monkey.
This post gives an overview about my GSoC project and the challenges which I encountered during this summer.
I am Shivam Awasthi, a recent graduate from IIT(BHU), Varanasi. As part of Google Summer of Code’23, I participated as a contributor for the MetaBrainz Foundation, where I worked on creating an Administration System for BookBrainz.
During this period, I was mentored by monkey, and ansh. With this post, I’ll be giving an overview of my project.
If you’ve been lurking on our forums, you will know that our style guidelines have been receiving lots of attention lately! Both MusicBrainz docs and BookBrainz docs have been getting new additions and updates, and there’s still plenty being discussed. As I type these very words, there are greased-up editors in what’s known to us only as “the pit” – pitting their words, experience, and muscular bodies against each other in a bid for dominance over typographical punctuation.
Okay, okay, so there’s not really a pit, but here’s a rundown of some of the style discussions that are taking place, or have taken place, this year:
After a two-year break, in-person summits made their grand return in 2022! Contributors from all corners of the globe visited the Barcelona HQ to eat delicious local food, sample Monkey and alastairp’s beer, marvel at the architecture, try Mayhem’s cocktail robot, savour New Zealand and Irish chocolates, munch on delicious Indian snacks, and learn about the excellent Spanish culture of sleeping in. As well as, believe it or not, getting “work” done – recapping the last year, and planning, discussing, and getting excited about the future of MetaBrainz and its projects.
We also had some of the team join us via Stream; Freso (who also coordinated all the streaming and recording), reosarevok, lucifer, rdswift, and many others who popped in. Thank you for patiently waiting while we ranted and when we didn’t notice you had your hand up. lucifer – who wasn’t able to come in person because of bullshit Visa rejections – we will definitely see you next year!
A summary of the topics covered follows. The more intrepid historians among you can see full event details on the wiki page, read the minutes, look at the photo gallery, and watch the summit recordings on YouTube: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
I am Ansh Goyal (ansh on IRC), an undergraduate student from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and introduced a new feature, CritiqueBrainz reviews for BookBrainz entities.
I was mentored by Alastair Porter (alastairp on IRC) and Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions made for this project and my experiences throughout the journey.
Hi everyone, I am Akash Gupta, currently pursuing my undergraduate from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. This summer, I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature — Series Entity— for the project BookBrainz.
I was mentored by Nicolas Pelletier (monkey on IRC) during this period. This post summarizes my contributions to the project and the experiences that I had throughout the summer.
Hi everyone, I am Prabal Singh currently studying in Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. This summer I participated in Google Summer of Code and developed a new feature – User Collections – for the project BookBrainz.
Today we come with a big BookBrainz website update that allows you to merge duplicate entities!
Being able to clean up the database is an essential step towards importing public bibliographic records and catalogs from partner websites. As with MusicBrainz, you can visit an entity page on BookBrainz and click on a button to add an entity to a merge queue. You can merge multiple entities in one go easily.
After clicking the merge button you will be presented with a page that lets you review and select the correct information in case of conflicting data. The revision history of merged entities is preserved, and in the near future you’ll be able undo merges.
This latest website update also adds annotations for any information that does not fit into the existing format, some small design improvements and bug fixes.
We’ve also added the ability to search for users on the search page. This last feature will come in handy soon as we introduce collaborative User Collections; stay tuned!