Google Summer of Code is now in its 16th Year of providing an opportunity for students to spend their summer break getting hand-on experience of contributing to open source projects with a stipend provided by Google. It can be a win-win situation for both open source organizations and students looking for a programming career.

Although mentoring places an appreciable burden on an open source project, being accepted by Google into the Summer of Code project is a big deal. As we reported, back in 2015 Google reduced the number of mentoring organizations, dropping the Linux Foundation and Mozilla, which came as a shock and a wake-up call. In recent years almost double the number of open source projects have applied compared to the number of places. This year Google was hoping to attract more first-time open source organizations into GSoC than ever before. Now that the list of 200 accepted projects has been published, new entrants are not flagged and all, or at least a lot of, the well-known "old" ones seem to be included.

Google Summer of Code is now in its 16th Year of providing an opportunity for students to spend their summer break getting hand-on experience of contributing to open source projects. It's stated goals are 

• Get more open source code written and released for the benefit of all.
• Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development.
• Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers.
• Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits during the summer: “flip bits, not burgers.”
• Give students more exposure to real-world software development (for example, distributed development and version control, software licensing issues, and mailing list etiquette).

GSoC has become a global program that has a real impact. Its website informs us:

Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together 15,000+ student participants and 12,000 mentors from over 118 countries worldwide. Google Summer of Code has produced 36,000,000+ lines of code for 686 open source organizations.

and, according to the Google Open Source blog:

Last year, 1,276 students worked with 206 open source organizations and over 2,000 mentors.

This year's Student Applications Period, during which interested students make proposals for what they want to do, is from March 16 -31 t with the pairing of accepted students and mentors announced at the end of April. Students then have a period of Community Bonding in which they get to know more about their organization's community before Coding commences on May 18 and continues until August 10th.

If you a student making your first application to GSoC and want more guidance on how to make a successful application, together with advice given to mentors on how to select proposal, the videos from 2018 on Google Summer Of Code 2018 Student Applications Now Open are worth viewing, After, all it never hurts to know what  is ideally required before you embark on writing a winning proposal.

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