New faces in the Tracker project

The GSoC 2021 cohort has just been announced. There’s a fantastic list of organisations involved, including GNOME, and I’m happy that this year two of those projects will be based around Tracker.

The two interns working on Tracker are:

• Nishit Patel, who will work on storing file creation times
• Abanoub Ghadban, who will work on improving custom ontology support

We were lucky to have several promising candidates. I want to shout out Nitin in particular for getting really involved with Tracker and making some solid contributions too. I want to remind all GSoC applicants of two things. Firstly that a track record of high quality open source contributions is something very valuable and always an advantage when applying for jobs and internships. Including next year’s GSoC 🙂 And secondly that if 5 folk propose the same project idea, only one can be chosen, but if 5 different project ideas arrive then we may be able to choose two or even three of them.

I also want to highlight the great work Daniele Nicolodi has been doing recently on the database side of Tracker. If you want a SPARQL 1.1 database and don’t want to go Enterprise^TM Scale, your options are surprisingly limited, and one goal of the Tracker 3 work was to make libtracker-sparql into a standalone database option. Daniele has moved this forward, already getting it running on Mac OS X and cleaning up a number of neglected internal codepaths.

I hope the increased involvement shows our developer experience improvements are starting to pay dividends. More eyes on the code that powers search in GNOME is always a good thing.