Liu: I'm Stephanie Liu, and I'm here today
with Leslie Hawthorn from the open source team.
And, uh, they just announced something
very exciting last week.
You wanna tell us about it?
Hawthorn: Sure, absolutely, so, last week we kicked off
the Google Summer of Code program for 2009--
so this is our fifth year of running the program,
so it's really exciting to hit that milestone--
and we started accepting applications
from open-source projects who wanted to act as mentors
for various students throughout the world
to work on their respective code bases,
and yesterday was also a really cool day.
We announced the list of accepted organizations for 2009,
so we'll be working
with 150 free and open-source software projects,
uh, to mentor our students this year,
which is pretty groovy.
Liu: Do you wanna tell us a little bit of a history?
Kinda like behind the program, and, like, why we do this.
Hawthorn: So, back in 2005,
Larry Page, one of our co-founders,
was thinking about kind of an age-old problem,
which is, you know, students go to school,
they work really, really hard during the term,
and then over the summer, they go off
and do various assorted things, and, you know, what happens?
Their--their knowledge of their discipline atrophies.
And, you know, he was thinking particularly
in terms of computer science, right,
and looking at sort of the-- the experience levels
of different folks who are coming in through Google
and also what he was hearing from other folks in industry,
and finding, you know, a lot of computer science graduates
weren't--or students weren't actually able to find jobs
in computer science or technical fields
during their summer holidays.
And, you know, hey, here's-- here you go,
here's open source, right?
Open source is completely distributed,
you can work on it from, you know,
the comfort of your own living room
or your local internet cafe,
uh, it doesn't require a specific job opening
uh, to be available to you, but, hey,
if Google provides stipends to these students
who are working on open source projects,
they have kind of an "ex-ternship"
in their chosen field, and they get the opportunity
not only to have a job in a technical field,
but to learn about real-world software development scenarios,
right, so things like using version control,
or working in a distributed team where, you know,
some of the developers are in, say, London,
and some in Beijing, and some in Sydney.
Liu: That's definitely important at Google,
with distributed teams.
Hawthorn: Oh, yeah.
Liu: It's much more challenging than you would think at first.
Hawthorn: Um, so, the thing I tell students
who are looking to apply to the program
is, uh, number one, don't be intimidated.
Um, I hear over and over and over again
that, you know, folks are-- you know,
they think Summer of Code is exciting,
they really like the idea of participating in open source,
you know, but they're just-- they're scared to death
because they think it's really competitive,
and it's really hard to get in, and they're not smart enough,
or they don't have a, you know, rigorous enough background,
and, you know, that's just not the case.
We have a--a wide variety of projects from a wide variety
of technical disciplines working with us each year.
Some projects are looking for people
who have almost no experience in computer science.
Some of the projects are looking for forks--
folks who are more advanced and maybe doing, you know,
post-grad research, for example.
So there's really something for everybody.
And--and one of my favorite examples to cite here
is, uh, a gal by the name of Angela Byron.
She was a student in the very first Summer of Code,
in 2005, and when Angie started off
working with the Drupal project,
she had never worked on an open source project before,
she was a community college student,
and she took a look at the Summer of Code and thought,
well, it's for students, right,
so they have to be looking for beginners,
so this whole open source thing, you know, I could do it too.
And she got involved with Drupal.
Now she's one of the biggest advocates
for the Drupal project, and, you know,
four-plus years later,
she is the maintainer for Drupal 7,
which is the latest release of Drupal,
she's on the board of directors for the Drupal Association,
so do not be intimidated, even if you are an absolute beginner,
this is still something that's completely accessible to you,
and if you're not an absolute beginner,
again, it's accessible, you just have to be willing to--
to take a risk, put it out there and apply.
The worst that you can do is not get accepted
and continue to be excited
about a particular open-source project.
Keep working with them,
keep learning more about their code base,
keep submitting patches or writing documentation
or doing whatever really excites you,
and then, you know, who knows what the future will hold
in terms of your opportunity to work with that organization
in, like, a future Summer of Code,
if we do one again,
or to get a job in that particular field, right?
Liu: So, what--what're the-- let's talk stats a little bit.
Like, how many applicants do we usually get,
how many people will actually get accepted?
Hawthorn: So, last year we had a little over 3,000 applicants.
And we had a total of about 7,000 applications.
And we actually accepted, uh, just under 1,200 students.
So, you know, about a third, uh, of our participants
actually, you know, joined the program,
so it's competitive, but it's not as competitive
as a lot of grant programs.
Um, and we do allow students
to apply to multiple different projects,
so let's say you're equally excited about, uh,
kernel hacking and open source games.
So if you wanted to submit an application to, say,
the Linux Foundation to work on the kernel, you could do that,
and you can also submit an application to work with,
say, the Thousand Parsec project
on their turn-based strategy game.
That's totally cool.
You have up to 20 applications,
so you could submit all 20 to one organization,
or 20 to 20 different ones if you want to,
but, um, another, you know, tidbit of advice
for students who are thinking about, uh,
applying to Summer of Code,
spend your time concentrating on just a couple of applications,
something that you're truly passionate about,
something that's really exciting to you,
because quality is better than quantity.
We hear that universally from our mentors,
so again, find your passion, scratch your own itch,
it's what's--it's what's exciting and compelling to you.
And that passion and-- and desire to improve things
is really gonna show through
when you're talking to your potential mentors.
Liu: So, what--what are-- what are mentors,
what are organizations, and what are we looking for
when we're looking for the-- you know,
looking through these applications?
Hawthorn: For mentoring--
So, uh, a mentoring organization is any group
who is working on a free and open-source software project
or a technology project that, again,
results in the production of open source code,
and this is--
I mean, the organizations that have participated--
both in past years and this year's--
are working on a hugely wide variety of--of technical areas.
I mean, you've got folks who are working on, you know,
media player software, you have folks who are doing
content management systems so that you can design,
you know, websites using their software.
We've got folks who are working
on the Linux kernel and kernel drivers,
we've got folks who are working on, you know,
creating open-source games.
We have folks who are working on, you know,
open-source CAD and automation software, we've got--
there's really a little bit
of something for everybody, right.
And one of the reasons why we select
so many different types of projects is
we want students who, you know,
have a wide variety of interests to come in
and start participating in open source development.
Um, in terms of what we look for
in the organizations that we accept,
there's a whole wide variety of factors,
and actually, if there are projects who are interested
in learning more about that, there's actually a full document
uh, produced on our website that'll tell you
a little bit more about our selection criteria,
so if you're interested in the future,
that would be a useful resource for you.
So, other advice that I would give to--to student participants
who wanna get involved in Summer of Code
and just open source in general,
is do not wait for Summer of Code to start
to get involved with an open source project
or to get involved in open source,
because Summer of Code kicks off for the year,
and all the folks who were, uh, you know,
interested in a particular project
who are really invested in that community,
they get really, really busy.
And if they've only gotten to know you in the last week
versus someone who's been hanging around a long time
and contributing a few patches,
answering questions on a mailing list,
um, you know, hanging out in the IRC channel
fielding questions,
they're gonna be that much more likely to want to accept
that particular person, and it's not necessarily because
they have prior open source experience or that they have
more knowledge about the project, exactly,
it's more about
they've already seen that that person
is willing to make an investment in the community.
There are so many good stories.
Um...
Liu: I like stories.
Hawthorn: I know, I like stories too.
Well, okay, so...
Okay, I just wanna be-- go on record as saying
I hate this part 'cause I always feel like
every single one of our students who finishes
is their own success story, and unfortunately, like,
now we've got, you know, 2,400 students
who've completed the program,
and I-I-I think I know maybe 350 of the success stories.
I really should know them all.
Um, so, a couple of really cool ones, like, uh, you know,
I've already mentioned Angie's story.
Uh, we have a gal by the name of Joanna Trinidad
who is, uh--who is in Brazil,
and she worked with the Globus Alliance.
They're a group of folks
who are working on computing technologies.
She worked on some single sign-on software
for them last year,
and as a result of her Summer of Code project,
she was invited to be a visiting researcher
at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
So--And we hear from students all the time, you know,
"I got my dream job because of being in Summer of Code,"
or, "I was hired to work at this, uh,
"software consultancy shop
"because of my Summer of Code project,
"and it was my mentor's business,
and I did so well that he wants to hire me."
Um, so, there's lots of cool stuff like that.
You know, other cool stuff like you may have seen, um--
I'm sure everyone's seen the Matrix movies--
um, one of our Summer of Code students--
Liu: Oh, that little thing?
Hawthorn: Yeah, you know.
Um, take the red pill, man.
Uh, one of our students, Adriato Montero Marquez,
one year he did a whole graphical user interface
front end for Nmap Security Scanner
that was in The Matrix.
So, I think one of the coolest projects right now
that I'm thinking about for Summer of Code
is actually Melange.
And Melange is the code base that's going to run
the Summer of Code program from here on out.
And it's the first open-source project that was developed
at Google, in the open, with community input
from commit number one.
And it was a result of a couple of things.
One, you know, we've got a community
of over 2,500 mentors
and 2,400 student participants from past years.
And, you know, clearly, that's gonna be more people
than Google is ever gonna be able to devote
to doing engineering work for Summer of Code, right?
And also, we've had people come to us over and over again,
saying, "Hey, we love Summer of Code,
"we love the model,
"we wanna do our own Summer of Code-like program.
Can we use your infrastructure?"
And since the infrastructure was all tied
into Google back-end technologies,
we were unable to do that.
But now, anybody can take this code, run with it,
plug it into whatever database back-end they want.
Um, our instance is running on Google App Engine, for example.
And, you know, make this program their own,
make this model their own.
And a lot of folks have already done that.
Right, we've got, like, uh...
The Finnish folks have done a Summer of Code.
We had, uh, a New Zealand Summer of Code.
There was a, um, Season of Usability
for students to work on usability issues
in open source software.
Like, the Gnome folks last year did an accessibility outreach
Summer of Code-like thing.
So, you know, we're watching this meme spread,
and now I've--I'm really excited about the fact that
not only is the model spreading, but now we're actually able
to provide to the community an infrastructure
to grow that model, and to--
you know, to make it happen on your own.
So that's really, really groovy.
Liu: That's really cool.
Hawthorn: And even cooler--
Not that I'm not, you know,
totally biased and excited about this--
Is the, uh--the committer team for the Melange project--
We actually handed over project management, uh,
to the community back in January,
and our project leader is actually
a former Summer of Code student.
Uh, Pawel Solyga, so he was a Summer of Code student
for two years, then he went on to become a mentor
for, uh, the Natural User Interface Group
in 2008, and now in 2009, he's, you know--
he's the project lead for the infrastructure
that's actually making the program happen.
Please visit code.google.com/soc
for Summer of Code.
And, if you would like regular program updates,
um, but you're not necessarily ready to apply
for Summer of Code just yet,
you can check out all the news you can use
on, uh, the Google Open Source Blog,
which is google-opensource.blogspot.com
So come on over, hang out on our blog,
feel the love with us, it's a beautiful thing.
Liu: Cool. Thanks, Leslie. Hawthorn: Thank you.