After the last in-person meeting in Munich in 2019 and the virtual meetings during the Corona break, the Google Summer of Code team once again invited Org Admins and Mentors to come together and share their experiences.

The summit took place from Friday, October 13th – Sunday, October 15th 2023 at the Google Moffet Park Campus in Sunnyvale, California.

The summit started on Friday afternoon, and before that I visited the nearby Computer History Museum. I was overwhelmed by the number of exhibits, from ancient calculators to modern supercomputers. I also played a round of Pac Man in the computer games section.

 

               

Since the visit took longer than I had originally planned, I quickly went to the hotel, checked in, spent a few minutes in my room, and went to the lobby to join the short march to the event location. I met Eddie, also from Germany, who was an Org Admin for the XMPP Standards Foundation.

   

We picked up our badges and some goodies and went to the welcome session. GSoC Program Manager Stephanie Taylor went over the basics of the next two days and we all briefly introduced ourselves. Then we had dinner and a few drinks. Meanwhile, the traditional chocolate sticker table was filling up.

   

Saturday’s opening session was cut short because we had a special treat waiting for us outside: a partial solar eclipse! We were given special sunglasses and everyone was amazed by the eclipse and tried to get a good picture. This is the best I could manage.

Here is an overview of the schedule, I marked the session that I attended.

I attended some sessions on finding (and keeping) good contributors, which is very important for the GSoC team and for us as an organization. You can find the full schedule and also available session notes here.

On Saturday evening, the social event took place. More swag was handed out and some cartoonists drew pictures of the attendees. Check out the cartoons here.

Sunday continued with interesting sessions and after lunch I went to the airport to return to Germany.

Since my return flight was canceled, I had to stay an extra night. However, this inconvenience could not spoil a really nice trip to the GSoC 2023 Mentor Summit. There were a lot of very engaged people there, who were also all funny and friendly. I would love to be a part of this group again at GSoC 2024!