by Oddvar Lovaas | Apr 25, 2016 | General |
Congratulations to Aviral Dasgupta and Will “Half-Shot” Hunt who will be working with Matrix for their Google Summer of Code projects!
As mentioned, picking two projects out of all our proposals was no easy task. However, we now look forward to getting started, and we are sure Aviral and Half-Shot will help make Matrix even better over the next few months!
Aviral will be developing a flexible plugin system to facilitate integrating various services such as github/trello/duckduckgo with Matrix. Meanwhile, Half-Shot will be looking at adding features on top of Matrix – infact, he’s already built a MPD DJ bot and started working on a .NET SDK. Aviral too, has been committing various enhancements already.
According to Google’s GSoC timeline we are currently in the “Community Bonding” phase, which lasts till May 22, 2016 – which is when the projects formally kick off.
We’re looking forward to seeing what awesome things Aviral and Half-Shot come up with!
by Oddvar Lovaas | Apr 22, 2016 | General |
As previously announced, Matrix is participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016. We have had a lot of interest: lots of people joining Matrix to talk to us about their project ideas and a total of 38 project proposals. We have even had some code contributions to our various projects from people who discovered Matrix via GSoC!
It’s our first year as a GSoC mentoring organisation and we were only allocated two project slots. This means that we had the tough decision of choosing between some really good projects – and that means a lot of you who applied will unfortunately be left feeling disappointed. Selecting our two projects was very difficult, and we talked it over until we all agreed. Please remember that not being picked does not mean that your proposal was bad.
If you missed out on a GSoC slot this year, that doesn’t have to stop you from contributing, either by hacking on your own project or contributing to an existing Matrix project. It’s a great way to hone your programming skills and we’ll be more than happy to help out and support you – find us in #matrix:matrix.org and #matrix-dev:matrix.org.
All the best from the Matrix team and good luck to everyone in their summer projects, whether GSoC or not!
by Oddvar Lovaas | Apr 13, 2016 | Events, General |
TADHack-mini took place in east London over the weekend with 88 people in attendance. There were $8k in prizes, and five different services to hack on. This time, we didn’t have too many people using Matrix in their hack, but we did have an excellent idea and implementation called Babelonio, who won our prize: a Phantom X Hexapod Mk3!
Babelonio adds speech-to-text and translation via Google translate to Matrix, via the Vector client and a Chrome extension. This is quite nice, because it means you don’t have to run a custom client. And by using Google translate, you immediately get access to a lot of languages (although sometimes the translation doesn’t quite work, as you can see in the presentation video). The project was done by Steven Bakker, Timo Uelen and Bart Uelen. You can see the presentation and demo of the hack here.
A good write-up of all the hacks and winners can be found on the TADHack blog.
Thanks to the TADHack organisers for another fine event, and also to everyone who came over to chat about Matrix – and again congratulations to the Babelonio team:
by Oddvar Lovaas | Mar 31, 2016 | Events, General |
It’s soon time for the 2nd TADHack-mini London. The event starts at 10am on Saturday April 9th and hacking continues until the projects are pitched, starting at 1pm on Sunday April 10th. As you can see by the many previous TADHacks, every hackathon brings interesting and impressive projects, so we are again expecting great things!
As usual, there are great prizes to be won – worth around $5k in total. This time, we will award the best Matrix-related hack a PhantomX AX Metal Hexapod Mark III from Trossen Robotics, a build-it-yourself hexapod robot kit! The robot is built on an entirely open source platform, complete with 3D cad models of the robot, open software, and schematics for the electronics.
If you’re planning to attend TADHack-mini London: see you there! If not – why aren’t you? Consider spending a day and a half hacking on some cool technologies – it could be well worth your time!
You can be one step ahead by getting acquainted with the Matrix C-S API or the AS API. And if you have any questions – or want to discuss potential hacks – please come talk to us in #matrix:matrix.org!
by Oddvar Lovaas | Mar 8, 2016 | General |
We are very happy to be one of the companies selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016!
GSoC is a great, global opportunity for students to work on open source projects during their university summer break. The idea is for students to propose a project for any of the open source organisations picked by Google, and – if accepted – receive a stipend for working on it. We are very eager to see what projects students will propose – we have written up some ideas here, but students are expected to do some research and come up with projects themselves.
If you are a student wanting to participate in GSoC for Matrix, please come talk to us in #gsoc:matrix.org – we are happy to discuss project ideas and review application drafts. We have also added some general tips on what to include in the application here.
Applications can be submitted starting next Monday, so there’s still plenty of time to have a play with Matrix and come up with a cool project idea.
Good luck!
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