Google Launches Summer of Code 2007

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Google has announced that it will be doing Summer of Code again this year. The program looks pretty much the same this year but they have built time into the program schedule for students to get up to speed before they start coding. Nice job, Google."

Nerd much?

[svunt (916464)]

I just can't get over the name...'summer of code' seems exactly right for a nerded-up spring break.

Re:Nerd much?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Nerds Gone WILD!!

Buy it now, $9.99

These nerds just cant wait to show you their interconnects. You've never seen anything like THIS before!

Re:

[Vexorian (959249)]

Who modded this troll? It seems pretty insightful to me. Do yourself a favour and do something else instead. Travel, meet new people, see new places. You have the rest of your life to spend in front of a computer!

Says an slashdot user...

It is not really a nerded-up spring break, since it is a summer of code.

Re:

[rjshields (719665)]

You're apparently not the target demographic for this sort of thing then. I have a feeling that the successful applicants will find coding a real project very interesting indeed.

Yes you're right. When you've spent all year sitting behind a computer studying or writing code, who could think of anything better to do than spend all summer sitting behind a computer writing code? Presumably this is aimed at same sort of person who closes all the blinds in the daytime and fills their room with artificial light.

Re:

[rjshields (719665)]

Whatever gave you the idea that PHP, Gaim, Xorg and so on are not real open source projects?

That's not what I said or thought and I'm not quite sure how you inferred that from my post! The point I was trying to make is that people who are really "into" their work will already be involved in projects in their spare time and so would not need anything extra to put on their CVs. They can then spend their summer break doing fun things other than coding. I really don't think it's healthy to spend 365 days a ye

Not helping the problem...

[commisaro (1007549)]

Couldn't they make it the Winter of code? That was programmers could use the summer to maximize their sun exposure over the 2-3 days/year they spend outside!

Re:Not helping the problem...

[Trogre (513942)]

For half the world, they have.

Re:

[kestasjk (933987)]

I'm in Australia, so it'll be for the winter, but the problem is that the winter holidays aren't as long as the summer ones at my uni. :(

Re:

[edschurr (999028)]

Four hours of minimum wage work will pay for a year's supply of Vitamin D3; who needs the "outside"? (As I understand it there is no ceiling).

Re:

[hachete (473378)]

BALMER:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of Google;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamb

pat on the back

[PoopDaddy (1064616)]

"Nice job, Google."

Google: "Thanks, Google PR employee"

project benefits

[Grumpy Wombat (899702)]

The SOC project might be worthwile from the point of view of the students gaining experience, but from what I have heard there has been a mixed reaction to the results from the projects they have been working on. Are there any metrics showing the net benefit (or otherwise) to the projects and the relative cost in supervision & reworking code (ie, we got equivalent productivity of say 0.7 of the mentors normal productivity for the time spent mentoring) and how many of the students went on to continue contributing to that or another open source project?

Re:

[TheoMurpse (729043)]

Yeah -- two years of Summer of Code funding for students working on gaim, and it still has yet to have a new (non-beta) release. It's getting close, to be fair. Also, from hearsay on the IRC dev channel on Freenode, the reason that video/voice hasn't been integrated into gaim like it was promised a year and a half ago is because one of the SOC workers changed the codebase so much that there was no way they could integrate v&v as easily as was originally planned.

So basically, from my POV as a pretty inte

Re:project benefits

[by Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe the Gaim developers aren't very good managers and/or have poor code modularity, Inkscape just released a new version with blur coded via a GSoC project, Blender is about to release a version with the insanely great sculpting tools also done via GSoC.

Re:project benefits

[by Anonymous Coward]

Gaim devs have years of practice doing exactly what you describe. If you had any familiarity with the project you shouldn't have expected anything else to have happened. Getting some SOC coders to work on the project is not going to completely turn it around.

Re:project benefits

[Jorrit (19549)]

That's only one case that you now mention. In our case (Crystal Space) every SoC programmer worked in his own SVN branch so there was no risk of the code being changed too much. I think most other projects also handled this in a similar way. So I don't see how this can qualify as a problem with the SoC program. If that same student had come to work for Gaim outside of SoC and if he would have done the same job then the same problem would have occured.

Greetings,

Exactly!

[jeffmeden (135043)]

This is just what I was going to say. This time around, google, PLEEEEASE put someone good on GAIM!!! Not that it's bad software, and I know that if I want it to improve I should shut up and fix it, but it would be nice to hear about SoC working for this project for once.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind the mentors approve the person.
This is the same as if you hired a consultant for 3 months.

The results you get from the students are a direct result of the support the mentor and the community around the project provide.

Also a large influence is the students ability to take advantage of both the community and the mentor. But this is hopefully less an issue as the mentor gets to chose the student.

Its only in its third year now. And I imagine the mentors have had no experience being a real mentor.

The best metric

[Per Abrahamsen (1397)]

The best metric for the success of the project on the host side will probably be how many host organizations reapply next year.

It is worth remembering that the student isn't the only one who learns from a student/mentor relationship. The mentor will know a lot more about how the problem can (or cannot) be solved after the project, this way the student implementation would act as a prototype.

Re:

[chx1975 (625070)]

Yes the results are mixed. But the Drupal project got a webchick (really, that's her nick!) from the 2005 SoC and since then we hope that every SoC will have someone like her (hardly possible, but let's hope).

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

The only SoC project I've been following is freenet [freenetproject.org], it definetely helped them out with various things e.g. a new portable queued download/upload manager, improved email-over-freenet and network simulations to model routing.

Re:project benefits

[webchickenator (1064974)]

My view is that SoC isn't so much about getting usable code at the end (though it's always great if that happens), but about attracting and retaining new talent to the project. I will use me as an example. ;) My 2005 SoC project was the Quiz module for Drupal. That module turned into an utter train wreck, because it was assigned to two students (myself and another guy), one of whom (guess which one? ;)) overbooked himself during the summer and wasn't able to get basically anything done. So while half of the project was finished (the backend, storage stuff), the other half was not (the front end, "actually take a quiz" stuff). It then fell on my shoulders to try and finish the other half in between other things after SoC was over. I had it almost working, and then a major API change landed just as I got a full-time consulting job, so the module was stuck in a limbo state for months. So by the measure of "usable code", that project was a miserable failure. However, in the meantime, I had become an active member of the documentation team, I was reviewing dozens of core patches a week, I was responding to user support questions in the forum, I was evangelizing the Drupal project to everyone I came across, and so on. Then after SoC, I went on to do even more things, and am now completely immersed in the community and helping out with core development. So hopefully, in the grand scheme of things, I have helped the Drupal project more than I have hurt it by the lack of usable code at the end of my SoC project. Though as a "happy ending" aside, I did manage to pick away at the module over the months to the point where it was semi-usable again about a year later. And some other people came in and took it the rest of the way, and now it's used on several sites, and has a little mini community of contributors around it. Woohoo. :)

Goddamit, I give up!

[by Anonymous Coward]

Just who the fuck are we hating this week? Whenever I think I've got it, you bastards post another "Google/Microsoft is Good/Evil" story, and I'm lost all over again.

Summer?

[ChipMonk (711367)]

Did Google move to Australia?

Re:Summer?

[martin-boundary (547041)]

Did Google move to Australia?

No, it's global warming. Soon, you'll notice it too.