Google Summer Of Code 2014 is its tenth consecutive year of matching up students who want real world coding experience with open source organizations who can make use of their enthusiasm. To mark this milestone 10% more students will be accepted into the program this year.

Google Summer Of Code's tag line is

"Flip bits not burgers"

and students receive a stipend from Google for their participation. To celebrate its 10th year the amount paid to students who successfully complete the program is increasing by 10% to $5,500USD.

The scheme a great opportunity both for students who are considering a career in software engineering and for open source organisations who are willing to provide mentoring.

The goals of the program are listed on the Google Summer of Code 2014 Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Create and release open source code for the benefit of all

2. Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development

3. Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers

4. Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think "flip bits, not burgers")

5. Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)

The program takes place over the summer university break period and is open to enrolled university students and those who will start university later in the year, who are aged 18 and over. 

As a global online program participants, students and mentoring organizations can be accepted from countries apart from Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma). Also those in Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, and Ukraine, who can participate in the program, won't receive t-shirts or other promotional items.

The number of  mentoring organizations for 2014 is greater than ever before with a total of 190. Over 2000 students will be selected to partner with these open source projects and many students contemplating participation are probably already in contact with some of them. However it isn't too late to apply by choosing an organisation that matches your interests and submitting a proposal.

In a recent post to the Google Open Source Blogspot, Mary Radomile writes:

Something we often hear from prospective students is that they don’t think they are “good enough” to be accepted as a GSoC student so they are leery of applying. We stress that the program is about hard work, dedication, and an interest in learning more about open source software development. You don’t have to be the most amazing coder the world has ever seen, but you do need to be hardworking and excited about the organization and project you are working on to be truly successful.

Student proposals can be submitted from today until March 21st and as this video about the student application process makes clear that's a firm deadline:

 

More Information

Google Summer of Code 2014

Google Summer of Code 2014 Frequently Asked Questions

Mentoring Organizations for Google Summer of Code 2014 Announced!

Related Articles

Google Summer of Code 2013

Google Summer of Code 2012

Google's Summer of Code 2011 (includes video)

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

JSNation 2024 Sessions Now Available Online 26/07/2024 The sessions of this year's premium Javascript conference, JSNation, are now available online and for free. Since there's a lot of material to go through we did a bit of digging to suggest t [ ... ] + Full Story

BusyBeaver(5) Is 47,176,870 03/07/2024 The thing about the BusyBeaver function is that it is very easy to understand, but very difficult to compute. We now know its value up to 5, which isn't much progress for more than 50 years work. + Full Story

More News DataChain - A Tool For AI Workflows .NET 9 Preview 6 Improves ARM64 Code Generation Amazon Updates Q Family And Previews App Studio Udacity's iOS Nanodegree Completely Revamped Google Launches Genkit For Go Learn Cryptography Without The Math Apache Releases NetBeans 22 DevToys 2 Now Cross-Platform Bruce Bastian, WordPerfect's Co-Creator Devoxx UK Sessions Now Available Online MySQL 9 Adds Support For JavaScript Stored Procedures Rust's Rapid Rise on TIOBE Index Fluid Framework 2 Now Production Ready