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Google Summer of Code 2023 Call for Project Ideas and Mentors

Alyssa Tong
Alyssa Tong
Jean-Marc Meessen
Jean-Marc Meessen
Kris Stern
Kris Stern
Bruno Verachten
Bruno Verachten
November 16, 2022

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global, online mentoring program focused on introducing students and new contributors to open source software development. GSoC contributors work on a 10-22 weeks programming project with the guidance of mentors from their open source organization. During GSoC, participating contributors are paired with mentors from open source organizations, gaining exposure to real-world software development techniques. GSoC contributors will learn from experienced open source developers while writing code for real-world projects! A small stipend is provided as an incentive.

See GSoC contributor eligibility here.

We are looking for project ideas and mentors to participate in GSoC 2023. GSoC project ideas are coding projects that potential GSoC contributors can accomplish in about 10-22 weeks. The coding projects can be new features, plugins, test frameworks, infrastructure, etc. Anyone can submit a project idea, but of course we like it even better if you mentor your project idea.

Please send us your project ideas before the beginning of February so they can get a proper review by the GSoC committee and by the community.

How to submit a project idea

Create a pull-request with your idea in a .adoc file in the project ideas. It is not necessary to submit a Google Doc, but it will still work if you want to do that. See the instructions on submitting ideas which include an .adoc template and some examples.

What does mentoring involve?

Potential mentors are invited to read the information for mentors. Note that being a GSoC mentor does not require expert knowledge of Jenkins. Mentors do not work alone. We make sure that every project has at least two mentors. GSoC org admins will help to find technical advisers, so you can study together with your GSoC contributor. Mentoring takes about 5 to 8 hours of work per week (more at the start, less at the end). Mentors provide guidance, coaching, and sometimes a bit of cheerleading. They review GSoC contributor proposals, pull-requests and contributor presentations at the evaluation phase. They fill in the Google provided final evaluations at the end of the coding period.

What do you get in exchange?

Mentor interaction is a vital part of GSoC. In return for mentoring, a GSoC contributor works on your project full time for 10-22 weeks. Think about the projects that you’ve always wanted to do but never had the time… Mentoring is also an opportunity to improve your management and people skills, while giving back to the community. GSoC is a fantastic program and the Jenkins project is looking forward to participating in GSoC again in 2023!

For any question, you can find the GSoC Org Admins, mentors and participants on the GSoC SIG Gitter chat.

About the authors

Alyssa Tong

Alyssa Tong

Member of the Jenkins Advocacy and Outreach SIG. Alyssa drives and manages Jenkins participation in community events and conferences like FOSDEM, SCaLE, cdCON, and KubeCon. She is also responsible for Marketing & Community Programs at CloudBees, Inc.

Jean-Marc Meessen

Jean-Marc Meessen

A perpetual and enthusiastic learner, admirative of all the cool stuff out there. Loves to share his discoveries and passions.

Kris Stern

Kris Stern

Kris has been helping out with Jenkins’s GSoC participation organization since 2022 and has volunteered to be a project mentor. She has participated in GSoC twice as a contributor/student previously in 2019 and 2020, and has been trained academically as an astrophysicist with a PhD in the discipline of observational astronomy obtained from the University of Hong Kong in 2021. Professionally Kris works in the IT sector as a software engineer / programmer. She has work experience in Python, C++, Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS/Sass, JQuery, SQL, PHP, and have completed projects in software development, artificial intelligence/deep learning/computer vision, Qt programming, and web development. Kris is passionate about open-source and would like to share this passion with fellow learners.

Bruno Verachten

Bruno Verachten

Bruno is a father of two, husband of one, geek in denial, beekeeper, permie and a Developer Relations for the Jenkins project. He’s been tinkering with continuous integration and continuous deployment since 2013, with various products/tools/platforms (Gitlab CI, Circle CI, Travis CI, Shippable, Github Actions, …​), mostly for mobile and embedded development.
He’s passionate about embedded platforms, the ARM&RISC-V ecosystems, and Edge Computing. His main goal is to add FOSS projects and platforms to the ARM&RISC-V architectures, so that they become as boring as X86_64.
He is also the creator of miniJen, the smallest multi-cpu architectures Jenkins instance known to mankind.

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