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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."

9 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
  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: 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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. :)