Episode: 1442
Title: HPR1442: Google Summer of Code
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1442/hpr1442.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:02:58

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We're ready.
Hello and welcome to this episode of HPR. I'm your host, Jonathan Nado. Today we've got an
exciting interview. I'm speaking with Carol Smith and she's the program administrator for Google
Summer of Code. Carol, I would like to thank you for joining us and giving us your time.
Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Awesome. Before we get too deep into the interview,
I'd like to ask you how did you even get involved with Summer of Code and what do you exactly do
at Google being the program administrator with the open source portion of Google?
So I've been working at Google for about eight and a half years now and I've kind of moved
all over the company. I actually started as administrative assistant then I moved into program
management but I started running Google Summer of Code just about four years ago now and I had
actually heard about the program when I had started at Google in 2005 and I got really interested
in it and when I had an opportunity to sort of look around within the company for a new opportunity,
I talked to the person who was running the program at the time and we did some looking around and
talked about it and I ended up taking over the program administration and I guess I would be
probably early 2010 now. Awesome. And so I've been running it for about four years now and yeah,
this is all part of our day open source programs teams outreach efforts and this is one of our
student programs and then we have a sister program Google Code and which is for 13 to 17 year olds,
which my colleague runs. Oh, cool. And so this is where it's talking before the interview. This is
the 10th iteration of Google Summer of Code, which is pretty awesome. Yes, yeah, it's been going
on for a while since 2005, yeah. Yeah, it's really great. I guess you would call it a service or
a thing that Google does within the open source community. I think it's really fantastic what
you guys do. Could you explain to our listeners maybe they never heard of Google Summer of Code
quickly or however deep you want to get what exactly is Google Summer of Code and why would Google do
this? Yeah, so at its core, Google Summer of Code is a university outreach program. It's intended
to get university students interested and involved in working in open source software and so basically
how it works is that Google at the start of the year chooses organizations that are working in
free or open source software to partner with and it usually ends up being about 175 or 180
organizations. So it's quite a few and they're all over the world. And then students actually
university students actually submit proposals to work for those organizations to create a project
over the summertime for those organizations and to be mentored by those organizations to get help
with creating and crafting the project and that happens over the summertime. So from just about
April until August of this year and yeah, and it's actually I should say it's not just for
undergraduates either. It's also for grad students and PhDs if there's any of those students
listening to. So okay. So it's so what's great is it's really kind of a almost a two-fold thing
for the student where you know you guys will pay the student I believe is it five thousand dollars
for? It's actually this year is part of the 10th anniversary where actually raised raised
the student stipend so it's actually if you successfully complete the entire program it's actually
5500 US dollars. Oh nice. Great. Yeah. So the student not only do they get paid to work during
the summer and you know they can actually do something they like doing instead of you know maybe
finding like a factory job or whatever working on a convenient store or something. They get to do
some coding but not only do they get paid but they'll get experience working with a free and open
source software project. Yeah and that's actually that's why I think it's such a great program
actually is because the student gets experience they have a project at the end of the summertime that
they can say you know I made this and they can put that on their resume and then they get the
experience working with that open source software community which often involves a lot of things
that university students might not get experience with like for example working with people across
time zones or across language barriers and also working in distributed development and
working on mailing list etiquette which some students need more than others. Yeah. And so and
then also I mean and the organization also gets that code as well at the end of the summer that
they can use as well so it's great for everybody involved. Yeah I've even heard some students say
that you know yeah after I did the Google Summer Code I graduated you know the next year
and that company I did work for ended up hiring me because you know their experience.
Yeah we hear that a lot we hear that those are some great success stories and we hear that all the
time from students that often their experience with with GSOC is what is our acronym for it their
experience with GSOC is actually what ends up getting them a job with the organization they're
working with or even if it's not with that organization they were working with it makes them
a lot more look a lot better to potential employers. Yeah absolutely. So I guess before we get into
what the students would do I guess the first process to ask about is you know say if I have a
project I'd like to submit to GSOC what is the project have to do? Yeah so the requirements for
mentoring organizations are that one that they have at some point released software under an OSI
approved license which you know most organizations that are working in open source already have at
some point yeah if you're really creating and releasing code you probably fit into that category
and then we also have a few requirements for the project to be large enough and viable enough that
they can provide organization administrators for the program so basically these are going to be
the people who are just looking after the project for the summertime they're making sure the students
are getting the attention that they need from their mentors and that and that the organization is
getting what it needs from the students and as long as the organizations fit into those two
categories then they're welcome to apply and actually applications open pretty soon they
hope they start they open on Monday February 3rd and they're open for two weeks so they close on
Valentine's Day on February 14th all right so did does there have to be a certain number of mentors
or does I mean that obviously has to be at least one but we only we only require that the
organization provides two organization administrators and then basically those organization
administrators can choose to also mentor projects if they're sort of a small organization then they
you know are maybe are developing community maybe they only want a couple projects that's fine
they can also mentor as well as be the organization administrator or they can have other mentors
from their community as well if there may be a larger larger project it's up to them but the
only requirement is that they have at least two okay and so now for the students I'm assuming as
they're applying they'll be able to see the candidates or you know the mentoring projects that they
can choose from so now can we take it from the students point of view what they would do yeah yeah
so so one of the things that as part of their application that organizations need to provide
is something that we call an ideas list which is actually one of the more I guess important parts of
the application and this is basically just a list of things that they think that the students might
want to work on basically projects that they think you know what makes sense for them obviously
as an organization but also that they think might be interesting for a three month project for
a student developer and so once we announce which organizations are going to be participating
which by the way is on February 24th where we announce which organizations we have this year
once we announce those organizations each of those organizations is going to have their ideas
list published publicly okay and so at that point the students can look at the organization
itself but they can also look at their ideas list and they can see you know they can start to
get some ideas of what kind of projects they think they might want to work on for these organizations
and so they'll kind of come up with some project ideas and then applications actually open on
March 10th okay which you might notice there's actually a bit of a gap there between when we
announce organizations and when students start to apply and what we hope is that students in the
meanwhile after we've chosen our organizations for this year we hope that students will kind of
reach out to these communities and say hey you know I'm interested in participating in GSOG
I'm interested in your organization you know I'm interested in this particular project could you
tell me a little bit more about kind of what you're expecting and you know they'll engage them
in a conversation so that once the applications open there's really just kind of the student just
gets to submit their proposal and it's already kind of been understood between the organization
and the student what the student's interest in working on so it's easier for everybody involved
yeah so student applications open on March 10th and then they close again two weeks later on March 21st
okay so with the like so what a student is it wise for them to maybe apply to a few projects to see
because I'd assume some projects could turn down students if they wanted to for whatever reason
yeah absolutely they they can submit up to five proposals okay any student can
submit up to five proposals and that can be you know that could be five proposals for one
organization or if you don't want to put your eggs in one basket that could be one proposal
for five organizations or any combination that thereof that the student chooses so yeah so I
mean they're probably going to find some organizations that are seem more interesting to them than
others and so they'll probably want to submit you know I I think you know if I were in a student
in this position I'd probably submit maybe two or three proposals yeah but I'll of course say
that of course quality is more important than quantity right right yeah and I guess that makes
more sense like you said there's a gap between the 24th and the 10th because then really you can
kind of you know bypass possibly being turned down because you can already speak to the project
let them know what you want to do and really kind of get sort of I guess you could say pre-approved
almost absolutely yeah the one of the not so secret ways to get into gsoc is to already be
involved with an open source organization and enthusiastic about the project you're going to work
on and have already spoken to the people involved about what you want to work on and how it's going
to look and then the proposal just really ends up being kind of a perfunctory submission and
but you and the organization are already kind of agreed that yes you're happy about this project
and you want to work on it and you're the right person for it yeah that's so now you said you
normally get like 175 to 185 projects can more than one student work on a pro is it one student
per pro pro pro pro project or how many students do you guys usually end up taking in for gsoc
no it's well we in total we end up accepting about 1250 students all over the world
wow but no one student can only work on one project at a time okay having said that there are
some organizations that choose to have kind of you know if they're big enough they'll kind of have
related projects they'll have some multiple students working on something that maybe is all
related to sort of one larger feature kind of thing but but yeah it's one student per project and
you can as a student you can only really be accepted to to work on one thing at a time
okay so i guess again so you know what what made google want to do this i'm even 10 years ago that's
pretty like looking pretty far ahead into the future no i don't know of any of the companies that's
like you know hey let's let's give each person five thousand dollars to work on you know this
open source project that we may or may not even benefit from like what possessed google to do
something like this um well i actually um you know i wasn't around for those conversations in the
early days i can say that but um i think it was a little bit of foresight on the part of some
people who were working in the open source program space at google at the time and they sort of
got to chatting and said you know what would make a lot of more sense for getting more developers
into free and open source and also what would make sense for how google can support and give back
to the open source community since you know google like a lot of corporations uses a lot of open
source code already right and wants to give back to those communities and it seemed to make a lot
of sense that if you want to encourage more computer science and technology students to get involved
in open source that you give them an opportunity to work in a space that they might not otherwise get
to when they're spending their time maybe working at McDonald's and flipping burgers yeah and
and so instead they could be spending their time coding and reinforcing the things that they've
been learning at university absolutely now does has google ever like i don't know if this is
overstepped in my boundary not but does does google like has anyone ever hired someone from gsoc
for google like do they do they kind of see what these kids are doing or yes we have we have hired
students from gsoc for google but i can tell you it's really the numbers aren't that big like you
said a little bit earlier it's a lot more common for us to hear from students that they get hired
by the organization that they are mentored by and that they work for yeah um specifically
because though that organization is now already familiar with that person's development style they
know them from the community they know how they work and they've already got a working relationship
you know google kind of isn't really involved in that part of in that part of it very much and so
it makes a lot more sense for these students to be actually hired by those organizations um but
yeah if we have hired hired a few of them oh that's cool yeah and i get i guess it even like i said
it goes back to it more than a twofold there could be a threefold like you know not only did they
get experience not only are they getting paid but there's a possible you know job opportunity at
the end maybe in the future for some of these kids so absolutely yeah and i think you know i mean
even even more than than google hiring them like i said i mean just having participated in gsoc
just makes your resume better just makes you look like better candidate for any employer that you
want to apply for yeah absolutely because you could point him and say hey i've worked on this xyz
project that's pretty well known here's you know you can even look at my my you know get
commits or you know svn commits if you want yeah and see what i've done so yeah exactly in a lot
of university students who you know you spend four years learning cs but you actually don't end
up with that tangible project where you can say yeah i built this in this and you can compile this
and this is what i this is how you can evaluate my code yeah absolutely now now where where should
i'm assuming there's at the one website the mentors and students can all go to the one website
applying all that stuff yep the website is google dash melange m-e-l-a-n-g-e.com okay and that's
where we actually administer administer both of our student programs so if you just go to google
dash melange.com you're going to come to a landing page and you'll have to choose google summer of
code and and from there yeah we've got the whole 2014 program page on there and once mentoring
organization applications open on monday there'll be a big link there to register and to submit
an application if you want to and then again once student applications open that there'll be a
big link on that front page for students to register and submit an application if they want to do that
awesome no no we that we did say this is the 10th iteration is there any other like special things
you guys do are doing other than giving an extra five hundred dollars is are there any other things
are doing within the program for the 10th year yeah there are a bunch of things one thing is
actually that we're just doing a lot more outreach and a lot more travel my team has been
actually in a whole bunch of different countries where we've seen a lot of participation over the
last 10 years I was recently in Poland and Romania and Australia I have some colleagues who were
just in Sri Lanka and are going to be in Belgium so we're doing a lot outreach all over the world trying
to encourage more students to participate encourage more organizations to participate so hopefully
we're getting more of the word out so that's one thing but another thing is that we're actually
accepting 10% more students this year than we ever have before which if the numbers end up
working out will probably be over 1,300 students so that's great yeah and then we're all accepting
10 more organizations than we ever have before which again if the numbers work out will be 190
organizations so yeah that's pretty amazing now do you ever I mean do you ever have to turn
organizations away I do you always get more than you need we do we do get more applications than we
can accept yeah that's that's the case every year unfortunately I mean it just ends up being
kind of a numbers game I mean there's there really is a limit to how many organizations we can
accept and every year we have to have to tell some some sad people that we're sorry but hopefully
hopefully you know with with getting the word out and having more spaces here maybe there won't be
quite as many sad faces as there has been in the past yeah so with I mean with the ratio then
is there almost like three students working on each per project then that's what almost sounds
like if you're you know roughly have 200 mentor projects and you have you know possibly 1300 kids
yeah so actually another initiative that we actually took up a few years ago when I started
running the program is that the last few years we've concentrated really hard on when we choose
organizations for the program we've concentrated on trying to find sort of those smaller burgeoning
projects maybe that are really only staffed by maybe you know one to three developers yeah and
tried to give them into the program into the program as new new organizations so that they can get
sort of a boost from from GSOC and from the student development developers that they can get
through the program yeah so we've been trying to encourage that so we've had on the order of about
50 of our organizations each year have been new organizations that have never participated before
that maybe just only a couple people so having said that we have a bunch of organizations that
maybe only have one or two student projects every year and then we have a huge organizations like
KDE and GNOME that are accepting you know 20 or 30 or four years because like you said yeah because
like you said even though you know there's GNOME they could have seven projects going on so
that's why they could have like 20 kids yeah so some organizations are very big and you know have
you know sort of multiple sub organizations the Python software foundation comes to mind they'll
have you know multiple different sort of organizations within their organization so it kind of
depends but then we also have you know the small organizations which maybe just have two student
developers for the year and that's fine for them yeah that's awesome is there anything else that
you want to cover Carol about GSOC or anything I might have overlooked or anything else that you
want to mention no I just want to tell everybody that if they go to the website that we also have a
whole bunch of we have our timeline on there so if they missed any of the dates or anything they can
see that and then we also have a huge very lengthy FAQ page so for any any kind of frequently
asked question that they might have they're it's probably answered on there and then the other
thing that's linked off of the FAQ which I want to just make everybody aware of is we also have
two open source manuals one is for mentors and organization admins and one is for students
and these are written by people who've participated in the program before to give people advice
on things that they might be concerned about or things that they might encounter and so I'd
really encourage anyone who's interested in participating in the program to read those manuals
and see if maybe their concerns are addressed in there so that's awesome so February 3rd is
when the mentoring opens in February 14th is when it closes and then the second March 10th is when
it opens for students to apply correct yeah and then those close on March 21st okay all right and
then can you want to give the the website one more time yeah it's google g-o-o-l-e-mallange
m-e-l-a-n-g-e.com awesome awesome Carol thank you so much for your time and and the google
summer of code I mean this is it's amazing you know what you guys are doing and you know getting
more you know more students into free and open source software and I think it's very effective
and a great way to do it so greatly greatly appreciate it I thank you on behalf of everyone
that's participated or that will and I'm looking forward to a successful g-soc this year
and and thanks for your time absolutely thank you for having me on the show all right thanks Carol
all right bye
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