Q1 … Suzanne Bowen: Congratulations, we heard you won an opportunity with Google Summer of Code. Please explain what is Google summer of code?

Answer from Muhammad Adnan: Thanks,  Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual program, first held from May to August 2005,[1] in which Google awards stipends (of 5000 USD, as of 2010[update])[2] to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free or open-source software coding project during the summer.

The program is open to students aged 18 or over.  Let me explain how it works. Google accepts open source organizations. Students submit their proposals to those organizations via Google and in turn, Google and mentor organizations accept the students who writes code for open source organizations. People get more open source code, and students get money, learns lots of stuff about software and code.

Benefits for all

Q2 … Suzanne Bowen: Tell us about your background experience and future plans in software engineering and development. Open source? Mobile? Telephony? PHP? Android, Symbian, Linux, Windows, etc.?

Muhammad Adnan: I just left my thesis /project to earn my MS (Computer Science) degree specializing in software engineering from Virtual University of Pakistan. I completed my BS Computer Science from Allama Iqbal Open University in 2006. I have more than 4 years of experience in software development. Started my professional career in .Net Development, and soon I turned to freelancing at rentacoder.com. I make my living from freelancing.

I want to attach myself with one open source organization, i.e., phpMyAdmin who was my mentoring organization in GSoC. I have planned to start my own open source project in php/mysql. I have planned Zend Php Certification this year INSHALLAH. Future is mobile apps, So, I have planned to adopt the Android as my first mobile platform because at this level, programming language doesn’t matter; you can adopt any language or platform. Important are your concepts.

Q3 … Suzanne Bowen What was the toughest experience you had during the weeks of Google Summer of Code? Tell us all about it, especially Android.

Muhammad Adnan: During the weeks of Google Summer of Code, I had a lot of tough experiences.

A week ago right before accepting my proposal, my wife gave a birth to my daughter, and in my university there was not summer vacations, and I had to work for my clients too. So, you can understand how hard it would be for me to manage all that stuff. Studies, work, family and GSoC
I’m greatly thankful to my family who cooperated with me a lot to manage all these things.  I put my days and nights for successfully completing my GSoC Project. Alhamdolillah

(Adnan holds up the certificate for us to see in the video.)
Q 4 … Suzanne Bowen: What advice can you give to new developers getting started and for the older guys and gals who were from “old school” like Perl, Cobol and Fortran?

Muhammad Adnan: Believe me, rocket science to manage and to successfully mark all the stuff is “Passion”. My advice is to get involved with your choice of organizations early. Look at the previous year selected organizations and start communicating with them, fix the bugs/patches marked in organization software and try to understand, what would be the best rocking feature for organization’s software and write down a quality proposal. That’s it

For older guys/gals, if you have strong concepts in any old language, then you can adopt any new language. Important are concepts. Mostly concepts are same in every language, just syntax is a bit different. I give credits to online tutorial sites. They are just few clicks away and you can become software ninja even you don’t need to go to a university.

Muhammad Adnan’s blog and follow him on Twitter.