Google Summer of Code

Community
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I’d like to look into joining Google Summer of Code this summer.

For those who don’t know, GSoC is a summer internship sponsored by Google, where open source organizations get full-time students as interns (paid by Google) to help take care of tasks. It’s a huge boon to many ecosystems, allowing potentially some impressive progress to take place, and therefore many organizations try to qualify.

In order to apply, we’d need:

  • A list of good task suggestions for students. These tasks need to be things that can be realistically done by someone working full-time over a single summer. Students can suggest other tasks, but we need to provide some suggestions.
  • People volunteering to mentor a student. Mentoring requires continuous communication and contact with the student, as well as responding to requests and questions. I’ve mentored in the past, and it’s a fun experience.

In general, Google wants to know that its money isn’t wasted, so we’d need to provide a schedule of desired deliverables where we check up on what the student has been doing. Occasional blogging by the student is also heavily encouraged, so as to show and advertise their work.

Let’s see if we can get a list of tasks for this summer. One nice thing about a task list is that even if we don’t get in this summer, once we have the list, we can reuse it when applying next year. I’ve created a page on ocamlverse for the list. Feel free to add a task there or here in this discussion – any medium-sized task in the compiler or ecosystem should be good.

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From my experience as GSoC administrator, it is important also to write:

  • General introduction about the project and approximate roadmap
  • Application process, template, contacts of the administrators and mentors, conflict management
  • Guidelines for writing proposal, contributing and testing methodology
  • Evaluation criteria for all tasks (1st term, 2nd term and final term)
  • Benefits for students and project that solving particular task can give
  • Additional information about task - links to the github issues, code paths, papers and references
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Also seems based on this issue https://github.com/OCamlverse/ocamlverse.github.io/issues/30

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I would be happy to serve as a mentor and provide a couple compiler-centric task descriptions. (On the other hand, I’m very happy to leave the application process in the hand of other people.)

(On a related topic, I got funding from the OCaml Foundation to mentor one Outreachy intern, to work on random-testing the OCaml compiler.)

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It’d be great if you could add some tasks you think are a good fit!

February 6th is the deadline for organizations to apply btw.

And great to hear about the intern!

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Gentle reminder - one day is left.

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Yeah we definitely didn’t have enough of a response to get things going this year. Hopefully we can do enough nudging that we’re ready by next year.

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Well, you are right, our organization prepared everything one month and half before, then only honing the application, ideas and so on. And we already have an experience of participation for many years. So it is better to prepare much in advance the next year. I can ping here if required a two months before the next application round starts.

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Hey guys. Is there any plans for this year?

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Organizations applications starts on January 15 and ends on Februrary 6.

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Haskell was accepted by the way, you can see their accepted projects page. Next year would be amazing to see OCaml among accepted organizations.
Haskell LSP is among accepted projects, OCaml LSP implementation would have benefited from the similar attention.

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