Here is a first update on what has been happening in Summer of Nix so far.
After publishing the initial announcement with @mat, @mightyiam managed participant applications and selected mob facilitators, who assembled three mobs of five people each.
Since beginning of June, @cleeyv was working on setting up a monorepo called NGIpkgs, and with assistance of @picnoir got a few sample packages from last year to build. Until end of June, @cleeyv and me, with help by @roberth, did some debugging, and answered a few design questions around the monorepo, such as what to do with projects that are already packaged with Nix upstream or in Nixpkgs. @cleeyv proceeded with documenting workflows based on his experience from past years, and providing sample configurations.
In July, @cleeyv got Hydra to automatically build all packages in the repository, and is now working on continuous integration for each pull request. Meanwhile, I was digging through NLnet’s database to assess and select projects to work on, collected additional information, got in touch with project authors, and wrote up issues. There was also some back-and-forth between Ronny, @edolstra, @mightyiam, and me around our bureaucratic obligations towards the European Commission; I read through hundreds of pages of grant agreements, double-checked the budgets, and started sorting through existing documents and collecting notes, such that the next two rounds of Summer of Nix can be prepared more smoothly.
Two mobs started out on 2023-07-17, the third one will begin 2023-07-31. Being distributed over three time zones far apart, they will then essentially work around the clock. Because of that, we had two brief kick-off meetings, and had an opportunity to learn to know each other a bit and answer some remaining questions.
@cleeyv will continue with preparing and documenting workflows for manual testing using containers and public cloud deployments, and later for automated NixOS VM tests. @mightyiam started preparations for the Summer of Nix hiring event planned for autumn.
I will post updates again in about a month.