Tuesday 15 March 2016

A chance to develop your skills with Google Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code offers you an opportunity to hone your software development skills - and get paid for it. Gavin Atkinson explains more...





Google Summer of Code is an innovative program dedicated to getting university students from around the world involved with open source software development.

Google offer a $5,500 stipend to students in exchange for them working on open source software over the Summer. Running every year since 2005, nearly 11,000 projects have been accepted from students in over 100 countries by over 500 organisations, and several students from the University of York have participated in the past. This year 180 organisations are involved, in such diverse areas as compilers to operating systems, web applications to virtual reality, FPGAs to games, databases to genetic research. There are projects written with Python, Ruby, Java, C, assembly, JavaScript, and everything in between. Whatever your areas of interest, experience and knowledge, there is likely to be a project that fits your skill set. Students submit proposals to participating organisations to work on projects suggested either by themselves or by the organisations, and if selected they are paired up with a mentor from that organisation to help them throughout their twelve week project. Summer of Code is a fantastic way to spend your summer earning money writing and releasing open source code for the benefit of all.

Two organisations in particular participating in Google Summer of Code this year have a special connection with IT Services. Arthur Clune is involved with The Honeynet Project, a security research organisation dedicated to learning the tools, tactics and motives involved in computer and network attacks, and developing open source security tools to improve Internet security, with a focus on honeypots and threat analysis. I am part of The FreeBSD Project, an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop and embedded platforms which can be found powering everything from the PlayStation 4 to huge Juniper routers. It's at the core of Apple's OSX and powers the servers Netflix use to stream movies worldwide.

Even if neither of those projects interest you, do take a look through the full list of organisations, available at:


The closing date for applications is Friday 25 March.


Useful links:

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