Students announced for Google Summer of Code 2016

It's that time of year again: 1,206 students have been accepted for our 2016 Google Summer of Code! Congratulations all around. We want to thank everyone who applied — it was another competitive year with 178 mentoring organizations receiving 7,543 proposals from 5,107 students.

Now we enter the community bonding period when students get acquainted with their mentors and familiarize themselves with their new community before they begin coding in May. In this period, students will do things like hang out in IRC channels and read documentation, become familiar with the code base and set their deadlines and milestones with their mentors.

If you want to review important dates or learn more about the 178 organizations that the accepted students will be working with over the summer, please visit the program website.

Here's to another exciting and productive summer of contributing to open source.

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

CCTZ v2.0 — now with more civil time

Last September we announced an open source project called CCTZ, a C++ library that enables computing with arbitrary time zones. Today we're announcing CCTZ v2.0 which introduces a new civil time library. Civil time is a legally recognized representation of time used by humans (i.e., year, month, day, hour, minute and second). The most common example of a civil time is a time zone independent date. In version 2.0, CCTZ's time zone and new civil time libraries cooperate with the standard C++ <chrono> library to give programmers a complete (and simple!) framework in which to reason about and solve even the most complicated time programming problems.

To learn more, please check out the project page on GitHub. Pay particular attention to the fundamental concepts section which establishes a simple, cross-platform and language agnostic mental model that will help you reason about time programming challenges with ease and confidence. And don't forget to subscribe to the new CCTZ mailing list to ask questions and learn about future announcements.

by Greg Miller and Bradley White, Google Engineering

Google Summer of Code marches on!

Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC) is well underway and we’ve already seen some impressive numbers — all record highs!

• 18,981 total registered students (up 36% from 2015)
• 17.34% female registrants
• 142 countries
• 5107 students submitting  7,543 project proposals

Student proposals are currently being reviewed by over 2300 mentors and organization administrators from the 180 participating mentor organizations. We will announce accepted students on April 22, 2016 on the Open Source blog and on the program site.

Last week, members of the Google Open Source Programs team attended FOSSASIA in Singapore, Asia’s premier open technology event, to talk about GSoC and Google Code-in. There, we met dozens of former GSoC and GCI students and mentors who were excited to embark on another great year. To learn more about Google Summer of Code, please visit our program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Google Code-in 2015 Wrap Up: Sustainable Computing Research Group (SCoRe)

For the next several weeks, we will be showcasing wrap up posts from the 14 organizations that participated as mentor organizations for Google Code-in 2015. This week we feature SCoRe, an open source research project based in Sri Lanka.

The Sustainable Computing Research Group (SCoRe) at University of Colombo School of Computing conducts research covering various aspects of wireless sensor networks, embedded systems, digital forensic, information security, mobile applications and e-learning. The goal of our research is to generate computing solutions through identifying low cost methodologies and strategies that lead to sustainability. The solutions we get by sustainable computing research projects conducted at SCoRe lab are important for developing countries like Sri Lanka.

Inspired by our participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), for the very first time, SCoRe lab participated in Google Code-in 2015 (GCI), with 13 other open source organizations around the world. We offered 250 claimable task for students and we had 27 mentors, mentoring students who successfully completed 164 tasks! We gained active contributors to SCoRe, from students who contribute to our open source projects even after the contest ended.

The tasks covered code, user interface, research, quality assurance, outreach and documentation. 44 students completed at least one task with us this year and eight students completed at least three tasks with us to earn a GCI t-shirt. Six students completed over ten  tasks each in competition to become grand prize winners.

However among these students we had to choose the ones who we felt had the most impactful contributions. We’d like to congratulate the two grand prize winners from SCoRe: Brayan Alfaro and Anesu Mafuvadze.

Below is a comment received from a student who participated:

“It was my pleasure working with you and the SCoRe Community. This contest helped me to enhance my knowledge in software development...I gained a lot of knowledge through the tasks I did. My mentors guided me every time and I would gladly work with this community in the future. I would love to contribute to you in every possible way.”

We give our special thanks to our mentors who voluntarily worked throughout the contest around their busy schedules and vacation plans. We’d also like to thank all the students who actively participated and contributed to our organization. SCoRe was pleased to be selected as a mentoring organization for GCI 2015 and we hope to participate in both GSoC and GCI again in future!

By Dilushi Piumwardane, GCI mentor, SCoRe

Something different — code up hardware in Google Summer of Code

In 1983, the same year I was born, a company called Altera was founded and created the EP300, their first reprogrammable logic device. The event was considered a major step towards the development of devices we now call “Field Programmable Gate Arrays” or FPGAs for short. In the following 33 years, FPGAs would go from extremely expensive devices found only in high end military and telecommunications equipment, to something even a student can afford.

The EP300 in all it's glory

FPGAs are exciting because they make the development process for hardware the same as software. Developers are able to create designs in a hardware description language (HDL), compile and then use them almost instantly! They make hardware code. Turning hardware into code makes it easy for open source developers to share, collaborate and improve the hardware in ways that would have been extremely hard, or even impossible in the past. 

There were 180 open source organizations accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC), and it is exciting to see several of the organizations using these technologies. I've highlighted some of the different types of hardware coding opportunities in GSoC this year below. (Anything I've missed? Feel free to add it in the comments section below!)

In the area of CPU architectures, OpenRISC and it’s spiritual successor, the RISC-V, are attempting to make a truly open hardware at the most fundamental level. In 2016 you could help this goal via participating in GSoC with either the FOSSi Foundation or lowRISC project.

Not content with the existing HDLs, both the ArchC organization and MyHDL organization (a sub-organization of the Python group), are attempting to make it easier to create these hardware designs. MyHDL is particularly cool because Python is normally considered to be as far away from hardware as you can get.

My own project, TimVideos.us, is using much of the work from these other projects to develop high speed video processing hardware for conference and user group recording (or maybe even video DJing).

Imagine developing hardware in the same way you write code. With FPGAs you can — and GSoC has numerous opportunities to create hardware using this exciting technology. With only 7 days left to submit your application, you better get cracking!

By Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell, Software Engineer on Chrome by day, open source hardware hacker by night