Announcing the top three winners of this year's GDSC Solution Challenge, as well as the people’s choice award.
We are pleased to announce the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Contributors for 2023. Over the last few weeks, our 171 mentoring organizations have read through applications, had discussions with applicants, and made the difficult decision of selecting the GSoC Contributors they will be mentoring this summer.
Over the next few weeks, our GSoC 2023 Contributors will be actively engaging with their new open source community and getting acclimated with their organization. Mentors will guide the GSoC Contributors through the documentation and processes used by the community, as well as help with planning their milestones and projects for the summer. This Community Bonding period helps familiarize the GSoC Contributors with the languages and tools they will need to successfully complete their projects. Coding begins May 29th and most folks will wrap up September 5th, however, for the second year in a row, GSoC Contributors can request a longer coding period and wrap up their projects by mid-November instead.
We’d like to express our appreciation to the thousands of applicants who took the time to reach out to our mentoring organizations and submit proposals. Through the experience of asking questions, researching, and writing your proposals we hope you all learned more about open source and maybe even found a community you want to contribute to outside of Google Summer of Code! We always say that communication is key, and staying connected with the community or reaching out to other organizations is a great way to set the stage for future opportunities. Open source communities are always looking for new and eager collaborators to bring fresh ideas to the table. We hope you connect with an open source community or even start your own open source project!
There are a handful of program changes to this 19th year of GSoC and we are excited to see how our GSoC Contributors and mentoring organizations take advantage of these adjustments. A big thank you to all of our mentors and organization administrators who make this program so special.
GSoC Contributors—have fun this summer and keep learning! Your mentors and community members have dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of years of combined experience. Let them share their knowledge with you and help you become awesome open source contributors!
By Perry Burnham, Associate Program Manager for the Google Open Source Programs Office
Google Summer of Code is a global online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors. GSoC’s mission is centered around bringing new contributors into open source communities through mentorship and collaboration.
2023 will be the 19th consecutive year hosting Google Summer of Code. We are keeping the big changes we made leading into the 2022 program, with one adjustment around eligibility described below:
We invite students and beginners in open source to check out Google Summer of Code. Now that applications are open, please keep a few helpful tips in mind:
Interested contributors may register and submit project proposals on the GSoC site from now until Tuesday, April 4th at 18:00 UTC.
Best of luck to all our applicants!
By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager, and Perry Burnham, Associate Program Manager for the Google Open Source Programs Office
By: The Coding Competitions Team
Remember 2003? Before Chrome, Google Calendar, Android, and YouTube? When we carefully cleaned up our saved emails because GMail and its gigabyte of storage hadn't arrived? Two decades ago – Google launched a global coding competition called Code Jam, which challenged programmers of all levels to test and hone their skills by racing to solve algorithmic problems.
From there, our coding competition lineup continued to grow. Kick Start began as a contest for recent graduates in China and quickly spread around the world. Hash Code, Google's first team-based challenge, started in Europe. And a first-in-class Distributed Code Jam asked participants to build solutions that could scale when run on multiple machines.
Throughout our coding competitions' 20-year history, you've generated billions of lines of code across millions of submissions. You've gone through hundreds of rounds for thousands of problems and put in millions of hours of code execution and testing. Over a million of you from almost every country worldwide have participated — from experienced programmers to students and everyone in between. And now, just as we invited you to our very first round in 2003, we're asking you to join us for one final event as the competitions come to an end.
Join us on Saturday, April 15, 2023 at 2 p.m. UTC as we host four simultaneous online rounds of competition at varying levels of difficulty. Register now to get in on the action.
And to those who've taken part over the years: It's been an honor to learn, succeed, fail, and have fun coding with you. Through the conceptual art, the slides, the gophers, and the absurd number of pancakes, we did it – and we did it together. Thanks for going on this journey with us.
As 2023 begins, so does our 19th year of Google Summer of Code! Last year, we had a few updates to the program that will continue for the 2023 program year. Our most noted change coming in 2023 is that we are expanding the program to be open to students and to beginners in open source software development. We are also continuing our increased flexibility in the length of the projects—offering 175 and 350-hour projects—and the ability to extend the program from the standard 12 weeks up to 22 weeks.
Does your open source project want to learn more about becoming a mentor organization? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn what it means to be a mentor organization and how to prepare your community (hint: have plenty of excited, dedicated mentors and well thought out project ideas!).
We welcome all types of organizations and are very eager to involve first-timers with a 2023 goal of welcoming 30+ new orgs into GSoC. We encourage new organizations to get a referral from experienced organizations that think they would be a good fit to participate in GSoC.
The open source projects that participate in GSoC as mentor organizations do all kinds of interesting work in security, cloud, development tools, science, medicine, data, media, and more! Projects can range from being relatively new (about 2 years old) to well established projects that started over 20 years ago. We welcome open source projects big, small, and everything in between.
One thing to remember is that open source projects wishing to apply need to have a solid community; the goal of GSoC is to bring new contributors into established and welcoming communities. While you don’t have to have 50+ community members, the project also can’t have as few as three people.
You can apply to be a mentor organization for GSoC starting today on the program site. The deadline to apply is February 7, 2023 at 18:00 UTC. We will publicly announce the organizations chosen for GSoC 2023 on February 22nd.
Please visit the program site for more information on how to apply and review the detailed timeline for important deadlines. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Guide, our new ‘Intro to Google Summer of Code’ video, and our short video on why open source projects are excited to be a part of the GSoC program.
Good luck to all open source mentor organization applicants!
By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager – Google Open Source Programs Office
Google’s exploreCSR Program is helping Kean University students Eric Ponte and Xavier Amparo change the face of pill detection.
We just wrapped up the final projects for Google Summer of Code 2022 and want to share some highlights from this year’s program. We are pleased to announce that a total of 1,054 GSoC contributors successfully completed the 2022 cycle.
2022 saw some considerable changes to the Google Summer of Code program. Let’s start with some stats around those three major changes:
In the final weeks of the program we asked contributors and mentors questions about their experiences with the program this year. Here are some of the key takeaways from the participants:
There were a few themes that rose to the top when contributors were asked what their favorite part of the program was:
96% of contributors think that GSoC helped their programming skills. The most common responses to how GSoC improved their skills were:
We know that’s a lot of numbers to read through, but folks ask us for more information and feedback on GSoC each year. Our hope is that we succeeded in providing additional details for this 2022 program. Every mentor and GSoC contributor took the time to fill in their evaluations and give us great written feedback on how the program affected them so we wanted to highlight this.
As we look forward to Google Summer of Code 2023, we want to thank all of our mentors, organization administrators, and contributors for a successful and smooth GSoC 2022. Thank you all for the time and energy you put in to make open source communities stronger and healthier.
Remember GSoC 2023 will be open for organization applications from January 23–February 7, 2023. We will announce the 2023 accepted GSoC organizations February 22 on the program site: g.co/gsoc. GSoC contributor applications will be open March 20–April 4, 2023.
By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager – Google Open Source
As New York emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech sector continues to play a critical role in the city’s economic recovery. While hiring has slowed in many of the city’s industries, tech is still among the fastest areas of job growth. In fact, there were more openings for tech positions during the pandemic than in any other industry.
We believe the city’s good-paying tech jobs should be within reach of all New Yorkers. That’s why earlier this year we announced the Google NYC Tech Opportunity Fund — a $4 million commitment to computer science (CS) education, career development and job-preparedness to make sure every New Yorker, today and in the future, has the chance to get into tech.
With over 680,000 good-paying tech jobs, New York has more tech workers than any other U.S. city. That means for every one Googler in New York, there are over 50 additional tech jobs here. So we’ve extended our support for tech in New York beyond our own hiring to the city’s overall tech employment pipeline — starting from the classroom all the way to the office.
We’ve had some early success: We’ve trained 1,200 New York City high school students through our CS education programs like Code Next and the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI). Meanwhile, Grow with Google has partnered with over 530 organizations to train more than 430,000 New Yorkers on digital skills with the help of organizations like public libraries and chambers of commerce. We also launched an apprenticeship program where over 90% of participants nationally landed quality jobs in tech, including at Google, within six months of completing the program. And we’re supporting New York-based startups through Google’s Black Founders Fund and Latino Founders Fund.
With the Google NYC Tech Opportunity Fund, we’re going a step further. We’ve identified key areas we believe Google can help address larger systemic issues and where we’ll focus our investments.
P-12 students with access to CS classes in school are nearly three times more likely to aspire to have a job in the field. But to offer these courses, schools need teachers who are trained in computational skills. After supporting a CS teacher training program at Hunter College in 2021, we committed an additional $1.5 million to The City University of New York (CUNY) and Hunter College to help them train more CS teachers and incorporate computational thinking into their curricula.
New York City's public libraries are essential learning environments for many, especially in under-resourced communities. Thousands of teens use the city’s three library systems annually to get college and career mentoring, build digital literacy, borrow books and more. So we granted a total of $1.5 million to Brooklyn Public Library, The New York Public Library and Queens Public Library to help them create special teen centers. These spaces will offer access to technology, resources and programs teens need to develop essential career skills for the future.
We’re also providing a $1 million Google.org grant to the New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC) to assemble a consortium of leaders in tech education and workforce development, and to seed a grant fund for organizations that support BIPOC job seekers in NYC.
As part of this effort, we also offer free Google Career Certificates for community colleges, such as The State University of New York’s (SUNY) online center. Over 10,000 New Yorkers have already completed a Google Career certificate and built up their qualifications for high-demand tech jobs.
By taking steps to support students and those already in the workforce, we can help ensure all New Yorkers have access to career opportunities so the tech sector in New York really looks like New York.
We are thrilled to announce the 2023