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Google Summer of Code 2015 @ the Python Software Foundation

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers post-secondary students an opportunity to be paid for contributing to an open source project over a three month period. Since 2005, the Python Software Foundation has served as as an "umbrella organization" to a variety of python-related projects, as well as sponsoring projects related to the development of the Python language. It is our intention to apply as a mentoring organization again in 2015, and this page coordinates those efforts.

The 2015 PSF GSoC coordinator is TerriOda. (terri on Freenode IRC, terrioda at gmail.com)

The other org admins include James Lopeman (meflin on IRC) and Florian Fuchs. More org admins will be announced once Terri has made sure they are available and interested for 2015.

The 2015 PSF GSoC mailing lists have not yet been set up, but our IRC channel is always open: #python-gsoc on irc.freenode.net. If you don't have an IRC client set up, you can use this link to open a web chat client

Please note that Python has a Community Code of Conduct and mentors and students working with the PSF are asked to abide by it as members of the Python community.

Preparing for GSoC 2015

Please note the Dates and deadlines for 2015. Right now it is off-season for GSoC mentors and we're dealing with wrap-up from GSoC 2014. You can expect the big push for GSoC 2015 to start in January 2015.

Students

This is off-season for GSoC mentors, so please don't expect a whole lot of activity on this page before late January 2015. If you wish to come back later, there will be a reasonable number of projects listed here by February 20, 2015, which is the deadline for organizations wishing to participate in GSoC 2015.

If you'd like to get started early, the best thing to do is to join the open source projects you're interested in and get started on submitting your first patches.

Here's 6 things you can do:

  1. Start communicating with the developers. Join the mailing list, IRC channel, or any other communication channels the developers use. Listen, get to know the people involved, and ask questions.

    • If you want to make the best first impression, DO NOT start emails with "Dear Sir." Python has many mentors who are female and/or prefer other forms of address. Try "Dear developers" or "Dear mentors" if you're sending a general email, or use whatever name they use on their email if you're addressing a specific person. Culturally speaking, first names or chosen nicknames are fine for most open source projects.
  2. Set up your own development environment.

  3. Find some beginner-friendly bugs and try to fix them. Many projects have these tagged as "easy" "bite-size" or "beginner-friendly"

    • Note that if you apply as a student with the PSF you will be asked to submit a code sample, generally code related to your project. A few fixed bugs with code accepted upstream will make your application look great!
    • Having trouble figuring out which bugs are beginner-friendly? Send an email to the project mailing list saying something like "Hi, I'm a student developer interested in getting some open source experience and I was wondering if anyone could suggest some bugs that are suitable for a beginner in this project?"
    • Some projects have beginner-friendly "bite-sized" bugs listed in the OpenHatch search engine, found here: http://openhatch.org/search/

  4. Find bugs and report them. Hopefully you won't encounter too many, but it's always a good idea to get familiar with your project's bug reporting process.

  5. Help with documentation. As a beginner in your project, you're going to see things that are confusing that more experienced developers may not notice. Take advantage of your beginner mindset and make sure to document anything you think is missing!

  6. Help others. This is a great idea for a lot of reasons: explaining things can help you learn them better, demonstrating your skills as a good community member can make you more memorable when your mentors have to choose candidates, and being helpful makes your community a better place!

Not sure which projects will be participating in 2015? Well, neither are we! Many orgs won't decide until they can get commitment from mentors, and often mentors don't know their schedules until closer to the start of the GSoC period. But you can take a look at the list of organizations who participated in 2014 or previous years to get an idea of what projects might be participating. If you're interested in a Python-based project that hasn't participated in GSoC in the past, feel free to tell them to get in touch with Terri to learn more about participating in 2015.

Mentors

We encourage mentors and mentoring organizations to think about new projects year round! If you'd like help with your ideas page or your separate mentoring org application, please feel to contact the organization admins.

New this year: we've set up SummerOfCode/OrgIdeasPageTemplate to help get you started, including some things that many orgs forget to include on the first pass!

It is our intention to run some IRC help sessions to help Python-related orgs polish their applications. They'll be run in January and February 2015.

If you're like to sign up as a mentor, please get in touch with your sub-org admin to get more instructions.

New Sub-orgs

If you're a python-based project who'd like to participate in GSoC but hasn't done this before...

In short, we ask for 3 things:

  1. Your project needs to be a reasonably established python project.
  2. You need at least 3 mentors (a sub-org admin plus 2 more) signed up for the whole summer.
  3. You need to have a good ideas page available online. (Including well-described project ideas that can be completed during the GSoC period, as well as lots of "how to get started" information.)

Please get in touch with TerriOda to learn more about how to get involved.

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