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Google Launches Summer of Code 2007

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the back-once-again dept.

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."

15 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Nerd much? by svunt · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Nerd much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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!

  2. Not helping the problem... by commisaro · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    1. Re:Not helping the problem... by Trogre · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For half the world, they have.

      --
      "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
    2. Re:Not helping the problem... by edschurr · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

  3. pat on the back by PoopDaddy · · Score: 5, Funny
    "Nice job, Google."

    Google: "Thanks, Google PR employee"

  4. project benefits by Grumpy+Wombat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:project benefits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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. And those that do, this is much different then how they normally operate.

      Most people say "read the list", they expect you if you wish to join the community to put out the effort. Projects that fail I think are a result of mentors failing to grasp the key difference.

      Summer of Code is 3-months. And after that three months expect the person to disappear.
      So you can't say be a mentor by just going around saying "check the mailing list".

      You have to be a mentor the same way a normal company deals with a contractor.
      The students have to be helped and hit the ground running with the communities backing.

      So far a lot of failures I've seen is this lack of understanding.
      Some do, but by and large students are not joining the community.

      So many projects complain that now they don't have a 'maintainer' for the code the student wrote.
      Yeah, well, what do you expect? You hired a contractor.
      The contract is up. You now have to maintain it.

      I believe once this difference is understood, and once mentors and the community around the project realize this as well, there will be a lot more projects the succeed rather then fail.

    2. Re:project benefits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:project benefits by chx1975 · · Score: 3, Funny

      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).

    4. Re:project benefits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:project benefits by Jorrit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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,

      --
      Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    6. Re:project benefits by webchickenator · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. :)

  5. Re:Summer? by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Funny

    Did Google move to Australia?
    No, it's global warming. Soon, you'll notice it too.
  6. The best metric by Per+Abrahamsen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.