So, I’ve been accepted to Google Summer of Code 2008 with Gallery, “the open source web based photo album organizer”.  My project title is “Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging” and I will be working out of Milwaukee, WI for the summer.  I’m incredibly excited to get started, and I plan on tracking my progress here.

My first Gallery-related task is actually unrelated to my project.  The developers wanted each GSoCer to perform what they called a “familiarization task”, which, as the name implies, is intended to be a way to dive into the Gallery code and way of life.  These were basically small bugs that needed to be fixed (open source projects usually have a long long list of open issues and bugs) that the developers believed someone new to the project could handle.  I believe I have fixed the bug I was assigned, but they also want me to write what’s called a “unit test”–code that proves that my bugfix does indeed work–and I’m having quite a bit more trouble trying to figure that out.  It’s never a good sign when your unit test takes longer to make work correctly than your actual code did, but I doubt this will happen often.  Once I learn the ropes better I hope to be able to crank out tests before I write code that fixes them.  At least, that is the way that unit tests are supposed to happen.