Category: Google Programs

Accepted Summer of Code projects

First, many apologies to our Google Summer of Code students for not posting about which projects we had accepted for this summer. The NGS release took an amazing amount of time and I’m finally getting on top of the backlog of things to catch up on.

Now on to introduce the projects for this year:

Eliza Gebow (Batsy) has been accepted to hack on Embeddable Widgets that will allow anyone to embed a MusicBrainz widget into their site/blog/whatever that will dynamically display MusicBrainz information about artists, releases, recordings and possible works if there is enough time. You can follow Eliza’s progress on her blog.

Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae) has already been madly hacking on improving our timeline and statistics pages. The goal of the project is to provide MusicBrainz users with a comprehensive tool for examining the growth of the MusicBrainz data and to understand how changes in MusicBrainz features and policy affect our database. Follow
Ian’s progress on his blog.

Last, but not least, Michael Wiencek (bitmap) is spending his time this summer hacking on Picard. First Micheal is focusing to make Picard ready for the NGS site — as we were developing NGS we didn’t have the resources to make Picard ready for NGS. Michael is fixing this and adding some new features to Picard as well. Michael has overcome his dislike for blog and you can follow his progress on his blog.

Most amazingly, both Ian and Michael have already shipped working code as part of their GSoC work. Ian’s bare bones timeline is now live on the NGS site and Michael has already released a new beta version of Picard. Amazing stuff — please keep up the good work!

Summer of Code: Accepted projects

Congratulations to the following students for being accepted to Summer of Code for MusicBrainz:

  1. Jamie McDonald (jdamcd): MusicBrainz Android Mobile Application
  2. Sean Burke (leftmost): Improve collections feature
  3. Jens Lukas (jensl): Development of an iPhone application for MusicBrainz

We’re currently in the community bonding period and work on these projects will start soon. Currently Jens and Jamie are reconciling their respective applications into one coherent application specification so that the application we deliver for Android and iPhone behave in similar manners.

Congratulations Jamie, Jens and Sean!

Summer of Code 2010: We've been accepted!

I’m proud to announce that we’ve been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code program again!

If you’re a student who is interested in participating in Summer of Code and would like to apply to work on a MusicBrainz related project, review our ideas page first. Then review the information we’ll be asking for on our Organization page for GSoc.

On March 29, the student application period starts. If you are thinking of applying, start the process now — getting to know the community and community review take a bit of time to complete, so don’t delay!

Good luck to applying students!

Google Summer of Code starts again!

Apparently we’ve all made another trip around the sun, because Google’s Summer of Code starts off again today. We’ve applied to be a participating organization again and we’ve put together our ideas page. This page lists the ideas we have for what students can work on over the summer.

However, we find that students who bring their own ideas and inspiration tend to work out better in the program. So, if you are a MusicBrainz fan and you are a current university student who can program, you should consider participating. You’ll need to make sure qualify by Google’s rules.

If you do qualify, can program, and are interested but you’re unsure where to go next, please come visit us in the #musicbrainz channel on irc.freenode.net. We can help you take your ideas and shape them into something that would be workable for a summer project.

Google donates another $30,000!

Google’s Open Source Office has once again decided to support MusicBrainz with another $30,000 donation! Read about how we use Google’s money on the Google open source office blog:

Last year, Google’s generous donation paid for a much needed server and it allowed us to hire our Google Summer of Code™ student (Oliver Charles) part time after the program wrapped up. The donation also helped pay for mundane things like keeping the lights on, backup disks and paying for insurance. But the most fun part that we spent money on last year was our phenomenal MusicBrainz Summit in London.

Thank you very much to everyone at the Google Open Source Office! MusicBrainz would be moving slower and be much more dull without your support!

Summer of Code: Acceptance and projected milestones

I’m pleased to announce that Google’s Summer of Code has announced which projects have been accepted. I’m pleased to let you know that our own Oliver Chalres and Lukáš Lalinský have been accepted to both work on our Next Generation Schema. Congratulations to both of you — this should be an exciting summer!

As the first act of getting ourselves organized for Summer of Code, the three of us have agreed to the following milestone schedule over the summer:

May 25: Object model and read-only user interface in place. This is essentially equivalent to Lukáš’ NGS-p implemented in Catalyst/Template Toolkit based on Oliver’s work from the last year. With this milestone users will be able to convert an existing database to the NGS schema and be able to browse the data in the new schema via the read-only user interface. No editing will be possible at this point in time.

June 29: The basic types are in place for editing artists, labels, and release-groups. Release and track level edits will not be complete.

July 27: Release and release related edit-types will be in place, but without a complete UI. The release edits will take a lot of work to get right so, we’ll have these edits in place, but may not be able to finish a working UI for them.

Aug 31: All remaining edit types are in place and the NGS enabled server enters a final beta phase.

Note that SoC doesn’t officially start until May 23 — we’re not wasting any time — in face our first milestone is due 2 days after SoC starts. Can you tell we’re serious this year?

Upcoming releases: Release groups and Next Generation Schema

In the past month there has been a ton of activity behind the scenes here at MusicBrainz and I can finally give a cohesive update on our plans for the next few months.

The much anticipated Release Groups release has been coded by Lukas in a weekend code sprint based on the old Mason codebase. Even though we had declared the old codebase as end-of-life, we have decided to push release groups out using the older code in order to satisfy the needs of the BBC and other customers. As part of this release, I will also add ISRC support and include a handful of bug fixes. Expect this release in May — I’ll post again when the date is firmly set.

And what is even more exciting is that we’re about to start work on our much anticipated Next Generation Schema (NGS). Discussed and planned over and over again, we’ve finally settled on an approach that appears to make everyone happy. As part of SoC, we’re likely going to accept Oliver and Lukas’ proposals to work on NGS over the summer. The goal is to implement all of the new schema in one release based on the TemplateToolkit/Catalyst work that Oliver has been working on since last summer. We’re going to take a step back and create a new object model/schema and then glue the TT UI onto the new object model.

The schedule puts the TT/Catalyst/NGS release into final beta test on August 31, with a release following in 15-30 days after that date. Please note, however, that there will be no other release based on Oliver’s TT work before NGS is release in September. We had to skip that release in order to pull in the schedule to make the target date of August 31.

I am quite excited by the work that is being done in the server area right now — we’re on our way to get past some significant hurdles. Just yesterday I got a first glimpse at the MusicBrainz site partially translated to Dutch — startling at first, but quite exciting when you think about it.

Many thanks to Matt Wood at the BBC for having the patience and dedication to work with MusicBrainz. Many thanks to Lukas for the coding sprint to get Release Groups off our collective plate. And of course many thanks to Oliver, Nikolai, Brian for your continuing hard work on TT. And thanks to everyone who has been supporting this team over the past few months.