Category Archives: GSOC

Why students in college should participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

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Hi everyone,

Today’s post is targeting students in college. The main idea is to sell you the idea of participating in the Google Summer of Code program that Google host every year since 2005. Oh and by the way, this is just free publicity, the program does not provide any money to me in order to get a post out of me! I love the program, after all, I’m an alumni!

What is Google Summer of Code (GSoC)

For starters, as a student, you must ask yourself, why would I want to participate in something I’m not even aware of, right ? Well indeed, that’s a good question. So, in a few words, it is an open source program hosted by Google during the summer break to provide the chance for students to truly experience software development and get a few bucks of out it.

A vast number of open source organizations are providing one (1) to many project ideas that a student could pick up, develop it during the summer and deliver before the end of the program. When you’re assigned to a project, you’re given a mentor who shall be there for you. By being there for you, I mean they will review the code you will deliver through a pull request and answer your questions whenever you have some. Usually, organizations will have a way to communicate instantly with the core maintainer such as a Slack channel.

Finally, it’s a remote position. When you given a project, you’re going to work in your home country and chances are that your mentor is located in an other one. In this day and age, this kind of situation isn’t problematic. I mean, a lot of companies out there have distributed team members where they aren’t even on the same time zone, but they still make it work!

Why participate? Is this a real job experience?

Again, very good questions coming from students! So, no, this isn’t a real job experience. Albeit it isn’t a real job experience, you gain so much from the program that it doesn’t matter. You get the chance to work with something that will either be completely new and thus, gain experience and new skills at the end of the program or, you can pick up a project in a technology stack that you’re accustomed with and simply add an original project to your portfolio.

Oh, and also, you get a referral to apply at Google, if you manage to complete your summer project successfully! It only works once, but you can use that referral up to 3 different positions within the company!

How does one apply to the program?

You don’t have to be in computer science or in software engineering to participate, although, it helps to have experience in software development. You need to demonstrate that you able to complete the project and also, that you’re passionate by software development.

Each organization can have their own personal pipeline to assess the individual skills of the people applying to their summer projects, and that’s necessary due to the sheer number of students applying every year and that number since to grow exponentially every summer! Some organization could ask to interview you online when the competition is fierce for top notch projects, some could ask for a basic code fix in their code, it all depends on the context! It basically comes to select a project and writing a presentation of yourself to showcase

  • Who you are
  • Why you’re interested by the project
  • Why would you be the perfect individual to take on this project
  • A brief summary of your industry experience related to the project
  • What you expect to be able to do in the summer
  • Your summer timeline for the project
  • How much can I expect to make through the summer?

Closing words

So, I hope this little incentive piqued your interest and pushes you to apply this year! By the way, you do not have to take on the most difficult project, take one that resonates with you because that’s where you’ll be able to shine. Oh and before I forget to mention it, students can expect to get up to 5500$ US during their summer!

Learn more on their website.

P.S If you want to learn more about the project I did while I was a student, I welcome you to go on my blog post on the topic and my Github repository where the code is located.

Kevin

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GSoC16: First coding week

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Hey guys,

I won’t say yet again that it has been too long because it really was. I’ll try to keep my blog updated weekly concerning a program I’m doing with Google this summer.  It’s called the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Basically, it’s meant for students to be able to contribute on an open source project with a community listed for the summer while being able to make a few bucks for the summer ($5500 USD).

Why am I doing this? Well, first, I want to expand on the knowledge I currently have. Being in computer science and software engineering, we can never stay in the same place for too long, we got to keep moving forward. By now, you should know that my background is in .NET. I completed three internships in .NET. Something that you may not know is that I completed the GSoC program last year. I had to help the Mono Project to update their code analysis and refactoring library which was using FxCop at the time. Being that I had experience with the Roslyn API, which is a compiler platform, enabling users to develop rich code analysis rules and code refactorings for .NET languages (C# & VB.NET).  So last summer,  what I had to do was to either find old code analysis rules done with FxCop and refactor them using Roslyn and also add a code fix provider matching that rule or implement new ideas that the project owners had in mind. A code fix provider is basically a fix to the “bad code” that was picked up by the code analyzer. For those interested to get to know more about the project or even use the library as an extension to their .NET solution, please take a look there.

Working on that project was a great opportunity as it lead me to my first remote job. Well actually, this is not a job, it’s considered as a student activity. We don’t have a steady wage. There are different phases and if the student passes a phase, he/she gets paid and is allowed to continue working on the project he/she was assigned. So basically, yeah, my first remote job experience. At first, it was difficult to be able to set time aside and focus on working on my project by own at my home or in coffee-house. After a while, it kicked in and I think I did pretty great since I was able to finish my work !

For this summer, I’m completely outside my comfort zone. I have to work with C++ in a Linux Ubuntu environment in order to develop a Telepathy Connection Manager for the Ring protocol. Basically, Telepathy is a real-time communication framework used by clients for instant messaging or video chats. Working with Telepathy and D-BUS, an Inter-process communication system,will be able to communicate with both phones and computers to enable two-way communication.

Right now, I have to do my proof of concept showing that we, at Savoir Faire Linux, are able to communicate by sending text messages back and forth. From that point, it’ll be easier to work on video chat which is far more complex!

Kevin out.