How we spent our Summer of Code

For the first time, Twitter participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and we want to share news on the resulting open source activities. Unlike many GSoC participating organizations that focus on a single ecosystem, we have a variety of projects spanning multiple programming languages and communities.

We accepted three students to work on a few projects:

• Kirill Lashuk (@KL_7) mentored by Cameron Dutro (@camertron) added more internationalization and localization capabilities to Ruby via the TwitterCLDR project. Among other things, he added the NFKD normalization algorithm, better access to Unicode code points and Unicode Collation Algorithm support, contributed over 6100 total lines of code, countless resource files and prepared the project for a new version of Ruby. His work should help anyone in the Ruby community needing robust internationalization support for their application.
• Federico Brubacher (@fbru02) mentored by Nathan Marz (@nathanmarz) spent time kick starting and adding machine learning capabilities (see the code) to Twitter Storm.
• Ruben Oanta (@rubeydoo) mentored by Marius Eriksen (@marius) wrote a MySQL client (see the code) for our RPC system, Twitter Finagle. It supports both the binary and text protocols, allowing us to use both regular queries as well as prepared statements. His work provides a great foundation for our database clients to make better use of all of our shared infrastructure. We were also thrilled to collaborate with Tumblr’s Blake Matheny (@bmatheny) on mentoring this project.

As part of GSoC, students and mentoring organizations receive a stipend. We are donating our portion of the stipend to Girls Who Code, an organization we support that introduces high school girls to software development.

We really enjoyed the opportunity to take part in Google Summer of Code. Thank you to our three students, mentors and to Google for the program, we look forward to next year.