Student Success in the Summer of Code

This year Computer Science student Alex Curtis (left), participated in the Google Summer Of Code (2008) program for the first time. Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

Alex had this to say about the experience:

'After the initial project proposal and technical review processes, I was assigned to the K-3D project. During the 3-4 month time frame I was tasked with building a fully fledged RenderMan Material Management System into the existing pipeline and also contributed in porting the entire code base to the Mac OS X (x86 + ppc) platform.

As I progressed through the program, it quickly became obvious that end user support, constant large scale regression testing and becoming accustomed to a sizeable code base are some things you just can't learn in an academic setting. These types of skills are invaluable and can be applied to anything I do in the field of computer science.

I have thoroughly enjoyed my time contributing to the open source project. So much so that when I was asked if I wanted to become a permanant K-3D developer, I jumped at the chance. As a "fully fledged" developer my role is currently centred around becoming the principle architect on a custom built rendering system designed around the RenderMan production pipeline. It will be composed around a specifically designed ray tracer with full RenderMan I/O compatibility.