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The final milestone of Symmetry Autumn of Code 2024 ended on January 14. The two remaining participants, Royal Simpson Pinto and Vlăduț-Ștefan Riciu, had two weeks to write up their final milestone reports. Once I received them, I handed them off to the judges (Jonathan Davis, Atila Neves, and Robert Schadek), and they in turn had a week to decide which of the two would recieve the final $1000 payment and a free trip to DConf '25.
The verdict came in on time, I informed Royal and Vlad on February 7, had acknowledgements from them by the next day, and then promptly forgot to announce the result.
Royal has been improving D error messages with Max Haughton as mentor, and Vlad has been working on upstreaming his previous integration of DMD-as-a-library and D-Scanner with Razvan Nitu as mentor.
I want to stress that both candidates did outstanding work throughout the event. They worked around challenges and problems, gained valuable experience, and learned some lessons along the way. They kept up with the SAOC requirements of posting weekly updates and writing Milestone Reports and worked with their mentors to get through to the end. I invite you to congratulate them both for the solid effort they put in.
The award of the final payment and the DConf trip is a motivation factor, something to work toward. It's acknowledgement of a job well done. The judges often have difficulty determining who should receive the award, as there's usually very little separating the final candidates in terms of performance. They look for distinctions where they can find them. I can only recall one instance out of all seven editions of SAOC in which the decision was unanimous. One year, it was split three ways!
That said, I invite you to offer additional kudos to Royal Simpson Pinto for his selection by the judges to receive the SAOC 2025 award. Royal tells us he intends to keep contributing to D, and we welcome his contributions!
I'm looking forward to congratulating him in person in London later this year. If you'd like to do the same, then please mark your calendars for August 19-22. We'll be back at CodeNode, courtesy of Symmetry Investments.
If you've already got a talk in mind, I'm ready to start taking submissions. Please send your proposal in a text-based format to social@dlang.org. It should contain the following information:
- Title
- Kind (talk, panel, contest, etc.)
- Expected Duration (should be 25-40 minutes)
- Target Audience (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced, all)
- Abstract - the "elevator pitch" in one paragraph (this goes on dconf.org if you're selected)
- Extended Description - additional details you believe are relevant for evaluating the submission)
- Brief Speaker Biography
We give priority to submissions on any topic directly related to the D programming language, though we welcome submissions on more general programming topics. Tell us about your D project, a problem you solved with D, an interesting algorithm you implemented, and so on. We also like to see first-time speakers, so don't be shy!
I'll have the website up by early March. I expect early-bird registration to open shortly thereafter.
See you in London!
