GSoC meet-up at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Today’s blog post comes from Verónica Estrada Galiñanes, a 2013 Google Summer of Code participant and current student at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Speaking of GSoC, the accepted students for 2014 have just been announced and the community bonding period is currently under way. Please visit the program website for more information.

Last December, our Google Group organized a meet-up event in ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since I am currently completing my PhD at University of Neuchâtel (UniNE), I thought it would be nice to repeat the experience for those living in Western Switzerland.

The first step was to propose the idea to UniNE faculty and find potential speakers. Several people offered to help and the idea took off. From Zürich, our previous speakers Seon-Wook Park, Iurii Chernyi and Wolf Bergenheim signed up again as potential speakers. From Geneva, Spyros Gasteratos showed interest to talk about his experiences as a student and a mentor for the OWASP Organization. From UniNE, my colleague Emanuel Onica said he had previous experience and advice to share. The icing on the cake was the generous offer from my supervisor, who offered to buy pizzas for the event! We finalized the date for February 27th.


Thanks to another GSoC enthusiast, Etienne Riviere, the event received publicity at six universities including University of Bern, University of Neuchâtel, University of Fribourg, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva  and the University of Applied Science Western Switzerland. I also designed the event website, a Facebook public event and a registration form. The event was further promoted in the local newspaper and announced in the official UniNE website and calendars.

Events sometimes come with a few surprises and in our case, two confirmed speakers canceled the day of the meet-up. However, we found a solution that allowed the speakers to join via a Google Hangout which turned out to be quite successful.

The evening of the event arrived, and we were excited to see we had almost achieved 100% attendance! Our audience was quite diverse, with computer science students from all level of studies participating in the event. Some had experience with open-source projects but few had previous experience with GSoC.

I opened the informative session by giving a general talk to explain the what and why of GSoC. We then moved to the next subject — the experience of the student and mentor in GSoC. I gave a short overview of my student project on file sharing in Freenet Project. The guest speakers, Seon-Wook, Spyros and Emanuel did a great job by sharing inspirational stories and giving valuable advice. The event closed with a question-answer session driven by Wolf through a hangout. Questions like: "What kind of projects are selected by Google?" or "Should I apply to a project in which I am already involved?" were addressed by the speakers. In the end, we all enjoyed pizza and other snacks while chatting about our future plans regarding GSoC.

Speakers: (above from left to right) Seon-Wook, Emanuel, Spyros, (below) Wolf (via hangout) and Verónica

The video of our talks can be found on YouTube (slides only) and the complete version is found here (speakers and slides sync).

By Verónica Estrada Galiñanes, GSoC 2013 Freenet student

Pictures by Raluca Halalai

Google Summer of Code meet-up at NIT, Warangal

Today’s post is from Rashid Kahn who represents the Google Developers Group in Warangal, India. The group recently held a meetup to introduce local students to Google Summer of Code.

The Google Developers Group - NIT, Warangal held a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) meet-up on 2nd March, 2014. GSoC is an annual program run by Google for university students and provides an opportunity for students to work on real software projects during their summer vacations. Project topics can vary and range from Content Management Systems to Artificial Intelligence, but all are focused on free and open source software.

The main agenda for the day was to introduce the students to open source software and give more insight into how things work in these communities. I gave a talk about my experience as a student participant for Tomboy.OSX and GNOME Calculator. The talk covered many aspects of GSoC and clarified any questions students had about the program. After my presentation, we brought in a Leap Motion Controller for the event to show the students some of the latest developments in technology.

The last part of the meet-up was a hands on session introducing the Git versioning system. We believe knowing a version control system is essential for today's software development and it forms the backbone for supporting any project development — especially those distributed over continents. We felt the best choice to teach was Git, due to its distributed nature and ease of learning. The students were showed the usage of basic commands used in Git, and were encouraged to try them at the event. 

The day came to end with students trying out various apps on Leap Motion Controller and trying out Git. We were excited for a great turnout of students to learn more about free and open source software and of course, GSoC!

By Rashid Khan, Google Summer of Code Student, 2013

Students Announced for Google Summer of Code 2014

Congratulations to the 1,307 students accepted for our 2014 Google Summer of Code! It was very tough for the 190 mentoring organizations to choose from the huge number of applications we received— 6,313 proposals from 4,420 students — and we want to thank everyone who applied.

Students will now enter the community bonding period where they will get to know their mentors and prepare for the program by reading documentation, hanging out in the IRC channel and familiarizing themselves with their new community before beginning their actual coding in May.

If you are interested in learning more about the 190 organizations that the students will be working with during the summer or reviewing important dates, please visit the program website.

We look forward to an exciting and productive summer of coding.

By Carol Smith, Google Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 10th year celebration in Singapore

During our whirlwind tour of SE Asia, the Google Open Source Programs team made a stop in Singapore to hold an event celebrating the 10th year of Google Summer of Code at the local Google office. Guest writer and GSoC enthusiast Ellen Wang shares her experience of the event below.

On February 25, the Google Open Source Programs team held a 10 year celebration for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program at the Google office in Singapore. I was proud to attend the event as a GSoC enthusiast and second year CS student at the National University of Singapore and also very eager to learn more about how the program works. It was so exciting that a team from Google flew all the way from San Francisco to visit us.


GSoC, a program that continuously attracts new blood into the open source world, is celebrating its 10th instance this year. Following on the success of the GSoC program for university students, Google started Google Code-in (GCI), a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students ages 13-17) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in open source.

On the day of the event, over 60 people attended the event including past GSoC students and mentors, professors from National University of Singapore and prospective students.  After a warm welcome to all the invitees, two Googlers from the Open Source team, Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman, talked about the steps involved in applying to this year’s program. Specifically, they talked about the  “10 things” GSoC initiative and described how the program will be enhanced to celebrate a decade of GSoC. One of these enhancements includes a 10% raise in the student stipend to 5500 USD. Stephanie then spoke about GCI and encouraged the audience to help get younger students involved.

Dr. Damith C. Rajapakse, a professor from the School of Computing at National University of Singapore, then gave a speech on his TEAMMATES project which was accepted as a mentoring organization in the 2014 instance of GSoC. National University of Singapore was also recognized for having the 3rd most students from a university participate in this program over the last nine years.

The event then featured local Singapore mentors and past GSoC students who gave talks on their projects, shared their personal experiences, and gave constructive ideas on how to develop a great proposal. This was perfect timing for someone like me, as the application period for students opened just a couple of weeks after the event.

The evening concluded with a networking session for students to talk with mentors, former GSoC students and the visiting Googlers. Guests were also treated to an abundance of  well-prepared food and refreshments. The attendees enjoyed the event very much — it was very successful in raising the awareness of GSoC and open source development. It was a huge help for me as well! I applied to GSoC 2014 (students will be announced on April 21) and I hope to start regularly contributing to open source development. Many thanks to the Google team!

By Ellen Wang Zi, Computer Science Student, National University of Singapore

MediaGoblin: our summer of awesome

Our final in a series of wrap-up posts from Google Summer of Code 2013 comes from Christopher Webber at MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing platform. MediaGoblin also took part in the Outreach Program for Women, a program inspired by GSoC to help get more women involved in free and open source software. Students from both programs are highlighted below.

MediaGoblin had a really great summer. We were lucky to participate in both Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program for Women. Read more about the great work accomplished last summer below:

Google Summer of Code Students:

• Aditi Mittal’s blogging media type works, and we are polishing it up before we get it merged into master. Several exciting things came out of her work, including efforts to generalize media types as plugins (which they now are!). We use this new plugin infrastructure with the blogging media type, which now has its own panel and view.
• Praveen Kumar got his search plugin up and running using Whoosh; efforts are now being made to merge and polish up with the present codebase.
• Rodney Ewing went above and beyond all expectations for the summer. Not only did he finish “pluginifying” authentication (adding multiple plugins including LDAP, OpenID and Persona), he helped immensely with code review and many other projects, including most of the work on the “pluginification” of media types.

Outreach Program for Women projects:

• Emily O’Leary worked on various testing tasks: improving the speed of unit tests (merged), working on a Jenkins testing setup set up for MediaGoblin, and getting a functional testing setup with Selenium. In the process, we also discovered some issues about how hard it is to get functional testing working nicely with MediaGoblin; many lessons learned), as well as the bonus task of ticket triage!
• Jessica Tallon worked on federation support in MediaGoblin via the Pump API. Jessica wrote a wrapup post which can give you some sense of things, but things have continued even after that blogpost was originally written. PyPump has been rewritten and works really well, can do all sorts of new things. Updating MediaGoblin to include the appropriate endpoints for the Pump API is currently in progress; there is much work still to be done, but an image has been successfully submitted to MediaGoblin via PyPump.
• Natalie Foust-Pilcher’s administrative interface work is now in place and pending review. The new admin interface includes new features such as the ability to set the terms of service / code of conduct for a site, the ability to submit reports on problematic users, and the ability to review and take actions on said reports. Additionally, some work has been done under the hood, including a nice new, "foundations," framework for adding default values into the database, and a new permissions/privileges system. All this thanks to Natalie’s work.

Overall it was a great summer. Thanks to the hard work of all our students we are much, much closer to MediaGoblin 1.0 than I would have dreamed. The only "downside" is that I now have a large pile of code to review and get cleanly merged with mainline MediaGoblin. Talk about problems you can’t complain about.

Thanks to all our students mentioned above… you all rock! And thanks also to our mentors: Sebastian Spaeth, Joar Wandborg, Aeva Palecek, and Aaron Williamson (well, and myself). Without you all this summer would not have been possible. And now, onward to use all this summer of awesomeness to make MediaGoblin the best media publishing software ever.

By Christopher Allan Webber, MediaGoblin Lead Developer