Tag Archives: student programs

Google Summer of Code 2016 is a wrap

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As school in much of the world begins, Google Summer of Code 2016 winds down. The last three months have seen a whirlwind of activity on over 178 open source projects. University students from around the globe have been working with their mentors to contribute their technical skills to the common good.

Student participants submitted their completed work late last month, mentors evaluated the submissions, and the results have been announced.

We accepted 1,206 university students from 67 countries in April and we are excited to announce that 1,032 students (85.6%) successfully completed the program. To learn more about how that compares to previous years, check out our statistics from the last eleven years.

Google Summer of Code isn’t over though. In October we’ll be hosting our annual mentor summit in Sunnyvale, California where mentors and organization administrations will meet and exchange ideas. 

Thank you to all of the students, mentors and organization administrators for your contributions to open source and for making the 12th year of Google Summer of Code such a great success!


By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

From Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 3)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

This blog post marks the end of our short series following our adventures in open source. As you may recall, it all started thanks to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which brought our team together. The GSoC collaboration spurred us to start a class Technical University of Munich (TUM) that eventually took on the Game of Thrones data science project and became an international sensation.

The success of our Game of Thrones project opened a lot of doors which is what we discuss in this post. First, we were invited to participate in the Morpheus Cup which is a prestigious university olympiad that brings together students from all over Europe to compete in digital challenges.

Our team rocked the competition winning two challenges and making it to the finalist stage in the third challenge. We were honored to represent our university and grateful for Google’s sponsorship of our team.
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The students and mentors of the Game of Thrones project at the Morpheus Cup challenge in May 2016. From left to right: Georgi Anastasov, Emiliyana Kalinova, Maximilian Bandle (all students), Guy Yachdav (mentor), Christian Dallago (mentor), Tobias Piffrader, Theodor Chesleran (both students) and Tatyana Goldberg (mentor).
Another opportunity that followed was an invitation to speak at a TEDx event at TUM on July 28th, 2016. In the event, titled “The Common Extraordinary,” Guy presented our work with data mining as bioinformaticians, sharing how we’ve made the field of data science accessible to our students and how we helped popularize it through the Game of Thrones project.

More speaking engagements are already scheduled: at meetups, coffee talks and conferences where we plan to keep evangelizing data mining and tell the story of our open source adventure.

What’s next? We’re excited to continue as mentors and org admins in GSoC and to carry on teaching data science and JavaScript at the university. A recent trade media report pointed out that the “out-of-the-box” thinking demonstrated in our course may revolutionize entire industries. In fact, we are currently signing up industry collaborators to work together on data mining projects.

It’s also extremely rewarding to see how our project resonated with so many people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Friends, family members, colleagues and even strangers ask us whether we can help them use data mining to answer questions on subjects ranging from politics, science, sports and even their personal lives.

Just the other day we were approached with the idea of developing an app that would take in a set of personality traits, process them along with social network data and help in suggesting life decisions: Should I date that person? Should I really take this job? Is Baltimore the city for me?

In the near future we dream of starting our own consultancy, as we already have requests from companies that want our help with upcoming data science projects. It seems our team has found its entrepreneurial bent!

We hope enjoyed this trilogy of blog posts, that our story has inspired you and that you too will continue to adventure in open source and collaborative development. If you’re not involved with Google Summer of Code, consider joining. It’s a great way to build up your project and share it with the world. More importantly, it lets you work with amazing people with whom, as we learned, it is possible to reach the sky.

By Tatyana Goldberg, Christian Dallago, and Guy Yachdav, BioJS

Stories from Google Code-in: OpenMRS and SCoRe

Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the third installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first and second posts in the series, too.

In this post we look at the stories of three more Google Code-in (GCI) grand prize winners. Our grand prize winners come from a pool of 980 students from 65 countries who, all told, completed 4,776 tasks for 14 open source projects.

We were lucky enough to host many of these extraordinary young coders at Google HQ for a few days this summer. Over that time, we learned more about where they came from, what they gained by participating in GCI and what they plan to do as new members of the open source community.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners explore the SF Bay Area in this immersive Google Street View display with fellow open source program managers Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman who run GCI.
Our first story today is that of Břetislav Hájek from the Czech Republic, who chose to work with the OpenMRS project because he sees their work as important. OpenMRS is an open source medical record system that improves healthcare delivery in resource-constrained regions.

Břetislav got into computer science through web development, so he started by working on tasks related to HTML and CSS. This gave him confidence to take on more challenging tasks. His favorite task was creating a web application for searching through patients. While he didn’t find it hard, he learned a lot and was proud to have made something useful. Reflecting on Google Code-in, Břetislav said: “That's the thing I like about GCI. I always treat tasks as opportunities to learn something new. And the learning is more entertaining since I work on real problems.”

IRC communication proved to be an important part of Břetislav’s success. Other students were there and tried to help each other out as best they could, and there were always mentors available to help guide them. He enjoyed the friendly environment. The community motivated him to work harder and try new things. In the end, Břetislav was glad to have participated and is motivated to continue his work.

Next we have Vicente Bermudez from Uruguay who discovered Google Code-in through a story in the local news celebrating a Uruguayan grand prize winner from a previous year. Like Břetislav, Vicente chose to work on the OpenMRS project because the cause spoke to him.

He got into programming through his love of video games and his desire to create his own. He hadn’t heard about programming before but initial research piqued his interest. Following his curiosity, he learned Java and expanded his knowledge from there. Conveniently, much of OpenMRS is built with Java!

The task-based structure worked well for Vicente. He was unsure of some tasks, recognizing that he didn’t know much about what they required. For instance, he hesitated to take on one that involved creating a Windows Phone app because he had never created a mobile app. But he persisted and, five days later, he had completed it and learned a lot about mobile development.

It surprised Vicente how much he learned in such a short time span. He had this to say: “During the contest I gained knowledge in a variety of fields such as programming, testing, video editing, and graphic design. The mentors encouraged us to think about quality instead of quantity, and I learned a lot from that.”

Vicente loved his Google Code-in experience and plans to continue contributing to open source projects, especially OpenMRS.

The last student story we’ll share today is that of Anesu Mafuvadze, a student from the US who worked with the Sustainable Computing Research Group (SCoRe). His introduction to computer science came through robotics in one of his high school classes which used a language similar to C++.

Anesu was thrilled by the experience of bringing the robots to life with code. He described his introduction this way: “The more I programmed the more captivated I became; I loved how easily I could convert my wildest ideas into fully functioning programs; I loved the thrill of working in an environment that demands minute precision; above all, I loved creating programs that other people found useful.”

Online documentation and YouTube tutorials fueled Anesu’s education for several years as he picked up multiple languages and began participating in programming contests. But he knew something was missing, Anesu lacked real world coding experience and had never collaborated with others. As such, he didn’t pay much attention to the readability of his code, wasn’t aware of version control, didn’t write extensive tests and had never built something for the common good.

Enter Google Code-in. Working with mentors helped Anesu deliver quality and building open source software required him to learn collaboration tools and value readability. The contest also gave him an opportunity to build on skills that he hadn’t developed, such as web development. Anesu says the experience made him a better programmer and that the introduction to open source has motivated him to use his skills on projects that benefit society.

Thank you to Břetislav, Vicente and Anesu for their hard work contributing to open source projects and for sharing their stories with us. We have one more blog post coming with more student stories so stay tuned!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Stories from Google Code-in: KDE, MetaBrainz and Haiku

Google Code-in is our annual contest that gives students age 13 to 17 experience in computer science through contributions to open source projects. This blog post is the second installment in our series reflecting on the experiences of Google Code-in 2015 grand prize winners. Be sure to check out the first post in the series.

This week we profile three more grand prize winners from Google Code-in 2015. These students came from all around the world to celebrate with us in June after successfully completing 692 tasks that resulted in significant contributions to the participating open source projects.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors were treated to a cruise around San Francisco Bay.

Students were paired with mentors who guided them as they learned both new technologies and how to collaborate on real-world projects. While most students had some programming experience, many were new to open source. In the end, they learned new skills, connected with open source communities and many will continue to contribute to open source projects.

We’re proud of all of the participants and grateful to the mentors who helped them. We invited the contest winners to write about their experience and many took us up on the offer. Here are their stories:

First up today is Imran Tatriev, a student from Kazakhstan who decided to work on the KDE project because loved their philosophy and had experience with C++ and Qt. He was a finalist in Google Code-in 2014 when he worked with the OpenMRS project.

Imran’s work on KDE included contributing to projects such as KDevelop, Marble and GCompris. His biggest challenge was working on the KDevelop IDE’s debugger where he was tasked with highlighting crashed threads. Highlighting the crashed thread was trivial, finding the thread that had crashed was not. It took him five days to solve that problem and he credits his mentor with helping him to work through it.

In the end, Imran learned a lot about regular expressions, the architecture of large software projects, C++ and unit testing. What did he like most about his Google Code-in experience? Imran writes: “The most valuable moments were meeting wonderful and smart people.” He plans to continue working with KDE and apply for Google Summer of Code.

Next is Caroline Gschwend, a student from the US who worked on the MetaBrainz project. Both of her parents are computer scientists and she credits them with spurring her interest.

A homeschool student with a unique approach to education, Caroline loves to learn and voraciously consumes free online resources. She had this to say: “I think that free, online learning is an amazing benefit to our society. With access to a computer and the internet, anyone, anywhere, can learn anything.”

Caroline discovered Google Code-in through her mother who had, in turn, discovered the contest through Google for Education. Caroline dug in and decided it was right up her alley. She loved that it embraced beginners with open arms and introduced new people to open source. Ultimately, she decided to work with MetaBrainz because, as a classically trained violinist, MusicBrainz piqued her interest. Their projects are primarily written in Perl and Python and, while Caroline was fluent in Java, it was too interesting to pass up.

As with most students, Caroline found collaboration to be a big part of the learning curve -- from GitHub to Git and IRC. Her mentors and other community contributors on IRC helped Caroline through the process and, looking back, she found that collaboration to be her favorite part of the whole experience. She loved that the mentors helped her to produce professional quality work rather than focusing on quantity.

Google Code-in gave Caroline a chance to learn about collaboration, Inkspace, icon design, web development and more. She has continued her work in open source and plans to apply for Google Summer of Code.

The last student we’re highlighting today is Vale Tolpegin, a student from the US who worked on the Haiku project, an open source operating system for personal computers. He also participated in Google Code-in 2014 but didn’t feel his skills were sharp enough to attack the more challenging tasks, like the ones he tackled this time around for Haiku.

Vale took on a wide range of tasks from documentation to application development, his favorite being the creation of the Haiku Hardware Repository. The repository is a Django website that lets people search and share hardware tests to determine if a given machine will work with Haiku.

He ran into a sticky issue early on, spending nearly a week finding a race condition within an application maintained by Haiku. Vale found it frustrating, but his mentors helped him see it through to the end. That wasn’t the only big challenge he ran into and, ultimately, bested: he spent another week debugging a Remote Desktop Application, software which had a very large code base.

Despite the two time consuming challenges, Vale managed to accomplish a lot more during the contest, including building a graph plotter and fixing bugs in the Haiku package manager. Vale had this to say:

“After finishing GCI, I have continued to work with Haiku and the experiences I have gained will continue to have an impact on me for years to come. Participating in GCI has truly been a life-­changing experience!”

Thank you to Imran, Caroline and Vale for their contributions to open source and for sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned, we’ve got two more posts coming in this series!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Stories from Google Code-in: FOSSASIA and Haiku

Google Code-in is our annual contest to help pre-university students gain real-world computer science experience by taking on tasks of varying difficulty levels with the help of volunteer mentors. These tasks are created by open source projects so while learning, the students are contributing to the software many of us use on a daily basis.

The finalists and winners for our 2015/2016 season were announced in February and, in June, the grand prize winners joined us for four days of learning and celebration. Students and their guardians came from all around the world. One of my favorite things, as one of the Googler hosts, was seeing the light bulbs go on above parents’ heads as they came to understand open source and why it’s so important. These parents and guardians were even more proud of the students as they learned how much their teenager has contributed to the world through participating in Google Code-in.

We’ve invited contest winners and organizations to write about their experience and will be sharing their stories in a series of blog posts. This marks the first post in the series.

Google Code-in 2015 Grand Prize Winners and Mentors

Let’s start with Jason Wong, a student from the US who worked with FOSSASIA. FOSSASIA supports open source developers in Asia through events and coding programs.

Jason got into computer science during middle school at a summer camp where he built a website describing the differences between Linux, OS X, and Windows.  He dove deeper into web development by learning PHP and JavaScript through YouTube videos. He enjoyed being able to build more complex and dynamic websites. Like many new developers, Jason became very confident but did not concern himself with important aspects of programming like testing.

He learned about Google Code-in when Stephanie Taylor, fellow open source program manager who manages the GCI program here at Google, gave a talk at his school. Jason dove right in picking FOSSASIA as the project he would contribute to.

FOSSASIA offered Jason a chance to learn a lot about development and open source. He worked on their event pages, integrated Loklak and added an RSS section to their website, gaining experience with version control, Docker, Pharo and Node.js in the process. Most importantly, Jason learned about collaboration. He had this to say:

“Collaboration is so important in the open source community as it allows everyone to come together to help the world. Google Code-in has persuaded me to contribute to open source in the future.”

Next up we have Hannah Pan, another US student. She chose to work on Haiku, an open source operating system built for personal computers, because it used the C/C++ language which she was already confident with.

Hannah got into computer science through a high school AP course and discovered Google Code-in through this blog (woohoo!). She decided to participate even though it had already been underway for two weeks. Aiming just to make the top 10 in order to have a chance at being a finalist (and earn a hoodie), Hannah finished as a grand prize winner! 

The learning curve was steep: *nix commands, build tools and GitHub all presented new challenges. She was surprised how much code she had to sift through sometimes just to isolate the cause of minor bugs.

Like all of the participants, Hannah found her mentors to be crucial in providing both technical guidance and moral support. She explained, “I was amazed at my mentors’ expertise, dedication, modesty, and high standards. They taught me to strive for excellence rather than settle for mediocrity.”

Among other things, Hannah added localization support to the Tipster app, fixed extractDebugInfo, and even wrote a how-to article relating to the work. Reflecting on her experience, Hannah wrote:

“On the technical side, not only have I learned a lot, but I have realized how much more I have yet to learn. In addition, it has taught me some important life skills that no doubt will benefit me in my future endeavors. I’d like to thank my mentors and other students who inspired me and pushed me to do my best.”

Thank you to Jason and Hannah both for contributing to open source and sharing their Google Code-in experiences with us. Stay tuned as we continue this series in our next blog post!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Student applications now open for Google Summer of Code!

Posted by Mary Radomile, Google Open Source team

Are you a university student looking to learn more about open source software development? Look no further than Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and spend your summer break working on an exciting open source project, learning how to write code.

For twelve years running, GSoC gives participants a chance to work on an open source software project entirely online. Students, who receive a stipend for their successful contributions, are paired with mentors who can help address technical questions and concerns throughout the program. Former GSoC participants have told us that the real-world experience they’ve gained during the program has not only sharpened their technical skills, but has also boosted their confidence, broadened their professional network and enhanced their resumes.

Students who are interested can submit proposals on the program site now through Friday, March 25 at 19:00 UTC. The first step is to review the 180 open source projects and find project ideas that appeal to you. Since spots are limited, we recommend a strong project proposal to help increase your chances of selection. Our Student Manual provides lots of helpful advice to get you started on choosing an organization and crafting a great application.

For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source Blog, join our Google Summer of Code discussion lists or join us on internet relay chat (IRC) at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early — you only have until Friday, March 25 at 19:00 UTC to apply!