This is a couple of days past, but I couldn't get my spoons together enough to write this till now.

Many of you know James Lopeman, mostly by the name of Meflin. He's a @ThePSF Fellow, been an Admin and Mentor for #GSoC , and been around the open source world, quietly in the background as is his way, for many many a year.

Meflin passed somewhat suddenly on Wednesday the 16th.

It was natural causes nothing too crazy there.

He was the absolute pinnacle of why, we in the open source world, need to care more about the folks who don't code. Those that deal with infrastructure, or people, or anything else that isn't just the code. We are fundamentally better off with them in our communities.

So in his honor, go drink some tea, be a giant grump, and remind folks that "No. is a complete sentence".

In the words of Terry Pratchett:

GNU James "Meflin" Lopeman

Share around, because I think this is bigger than just him, but I think everyone needs to hear what he at least meant to me.

Reading #GSoC proposals again today, the ones I might actually mentor, and so far I've read a couple that were mediocre and 4 that proposed mostly stuff the tool already does. I'm guessing they're AI generated from our docs or something? Still grumpy about this whole year of proposals even though I know there are some actually decent ones in this pile that I'll find eventually. Around 40 more to read but I need a break.

Google Summer of Code 2025. Joomla got about 270 proposals for projects. Now we mentors have to evaluate them all. ChatGPT makes it easy to produce a proposal. But mentors must at least open every doc, searching for a hidden gem. Nice job!
#GSoC #GSoC2025

Learn how to apply to be a GSoC contributor.

https://youtu.be/YN7uGCg5vLg

Open source organizations are ready to welcome new, excited contributors into their communities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6xdQInKZh8

Want to learn more about Google Summer of Code?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxjxwx7mqaI

Éric Bréhault @ebrehault provides an overview of Plone and Google Summer of Code 2025 #plone #plone6 #wpd2025 #CMS #Python #React #volto #opensource #community #gsoc #googlesummerofcode https://youtu.be/w4AYKTwiAok

Have a terrible headache today, but Doctor Hatch (dogtor!) is here to make sure I don't move and throw up my painkillers before they take effect.

Headache is definitely related to rejecting ~250 low-quality Python #gsoc proposals yesterday. Too much screen time and not enough sleep. I saw the signs but I really wanted to get the first pass done so no one else had to look through so many. There's still plenty of trash, that was just the ones that obviously didn't follow *any* of the instructions. There's 40 mentors who will help with sorting out the other 330 and evaluating them properly.

Time to review the #GSoC proposals. Looks like 26 for my project. Let’s see how many spotted the secret “we could do this if it were in core” that I deliberately never spoke out loud… #Django

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal for this year’s Google Summer of Code with Wagtail We got 69 in total! Lots of excellent proposals, it’s not going to be easy for us to select which ones we can go ahead with #GSoC

Eine neue Ausgabe des Freifunkradios wurde veröffentlicht:

ffradio126: Projekte und Veranstaltungen 2025

https://radio.freifunk.net/2025/04/09/projekte-und-veranstaltungen-2025/

Viel Spaß beim Hören!

Ugh, Python got over 500 #GSoC applications this year and so many of them are absolutely trash, didn't follow any of the instructions. Most years about half of our applications are like this. But usually we have a lot fewer applicants and the submissions were blank files not plausible AI nonsense.

So I'm stuck reading hundreds of incredibly low quality nonsensical submissions today in hopes to take some workload off my other unpaid volunteer mentors. This is not the volunteer gig I signed up for 15 years ago when it was mostly working with new contributors and not their AI chatbots and I'm grumpy.