Tag Archives: Announcements

Season of Docs now accepting organization applications

The newly launched Season of Docs program is excited to announce that organization applications are now open!

Deadline for organization applications:
April 23, 2019 at 20:00 UTC. 

Documentation is essential to the adoption of open source projects as well as to the success of their communities. Consequently, Season of Docs was created to bring together technical writers and open source projects to foster collaboration and improve documentation in the open source space. You can find out more about the program on the introduction page of the website.

How does my organization apply to take part in Season of Docs?

Open source organizations can now submit applications to participate in Season of Docs. First, read the organization administrator guide and guidelines for creating an organization application on the Season of Docs website.

Organizations can submit their applications here: https://forms.gle/axk8AvV561K2cT6S6.

Your organization application should include one or more projects that you would like a technical writer to work on. Take a look at the examples of project ideas, then describe one or more specific projects based on your open source project’s actual documentation needs. Your goal is to attract technical writers to your organization, making them feel comfortable about approaching the organization and excited about what they can achieve in collaboration with your mentors.

Reach out to your community members to see who would like to be a mentor for Season of Docs. They may also have great suggestions for project ideas. Mentors don’t need technical writing skills. Instead, they are members of the open source organization who know the value of good documentation and who are experienced in your organization’s processes and tools. See the guidelines on working with a technical writer.

Once you have selected mentors for your organization, have them register with Season of Docs using this form: https://forms.gle/a1x26WQGzURLerv66.

Organization applications close on April 23 at 20:00 UTC.

If you have any questions about the program, please email us at [email protected].

General timeline

  • April 2-23: Open source organizations apply to take part in Season of Docs
  • April 30: Google publishes the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects
  • April 30 - June 28: Technical writers choose the project they’d like to work on and submit their proposals to Season of Docs 
  • July 30: Google announces the accepted technical writer projects
  • August 1 - September 1: Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors
  • September 2 - November 29: Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period
  • December 10: Google publishes the list of successfully-completed projects.
See the full timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Join us

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about participating in the program. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Examine the timeline, check out the FAQ, and apply now!

By Andrew Chen, Google Open Source and Sarah Maddox, Google Technical Writer

Accepting student applications for Google Summer of Code 2019

We are now accepting applications from university students who want to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Want to hone your software development skills while doing good for the open source community?

This year we are celebrating 15 years of introducing university students from around the world to open source software communities and our passionate community of mentors. For 3three months students code from the comfort of their homes and receive stipends based on thefor successful completion of their project milestones.

Past participants say the real-world experience that GSoC provides sharpened their technical skills, boosted their confidence, expanded their professional network and enhanced their resume.

Interested students can submit proposals on the program site between now and Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

While many students began preparing in late February when we announced the 200+ participating open source organizations, it’s not too late for you to start! The first step is to browse the list of organizations and look for project ideas that appeal to you. Next, reach out to the organization to introduce yourself and determine if your skills and interests are a good fit. Since spots are limited, we recommend writing a strong proposal and submitting a draft early so you can get feedback from the organization and increase the odds of being selected.

You can learn more about how to prepare by watching the video below and checking out the Student Guide and Advice for Students.


You can find more information on our website, including a full timeline of important dates. We also highly recommend reviewing the FAQ and Program Rules.

Remember to submit your proposals early as you only have until Tuesday, April 9 at 18:00 UTC. Good luck to all who apply!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019

Posted by Kacey Fahey, Developer Marketing, Google Play & Android

We're excited to host the Google Mobile Developer Day at Game Developers Conference 2019. We are taking this opportunity to share best practices and our plans to help your games businesses, which are fuelling incredible growth in the global mobile games market. According to Newzoo, mobile games revenue is projected to account for nearly 60% of global games revenue by 2021. The drivers of this growth come in many forms, including more developers building great games, new game styles blurring the lines of traditional genres, and the explosion of gaming in emerging markets - most notably in India.

Image Source: GamesIndustry.biz

To support your growth, Google is focused on improving the game development experience on Android. We are investing in tools to give you better insights into what is happening on devices, as well as in people and teams to address your feedback about the development process, graphics, multiplayer experiences, and more.

We have some great updates and new tools to improve game discovery and monetization on Google Play, which we also shared today during our Mobile Developer Day:

Pre-registration now in general availability

Starting today, we are launching pre-registration for general availability. Set up a pre-registration campaign in the Google Play Console and start marketing your games to build awareness before launch. Users who pre-register receive a notification at launch, which helps increase day one installs.

Google Play Instant gaining adoption

We have seen strong adoption of Google Play Instant with 3x growth in the number of instant games and 5x growth in the number of instant sessions over the last six months. Instant experiences allow players to tap the 'Try Now' button on your store listing page and go straight to a demo experience in a matter of seconds, without installing. Now, they're even easier to build with Cocos and Unity plug-ins and an expanded implementation partner program. Discover the latest updates on Google Play Instant.

Android App Bundles momentum and new large download size threshold

Over 60K apps and games on Google Play are now using the Android App Bundle publishing format, which is supported in Android Studio, Unity, and Cocos Creator. The app bundle uses Google Play's Dynamic Delivery to deliver a smaller, optimized APK containing only the resources needed for a specific device.

To better support high quality game experiences and reflect improved devices, we've also increased the size limit for APKs generated from app bundles to 150MB and raised the threshold for large download user warnings on the Google Play Store to 150MB, from 100MB.

Improved tools in the Google Play Console

Store listing experiments let you A/B test changes to your store listing on actual Play Store visitors. We recently rolled out improvements, introducing two new metrics - first time installers and D1 retained users - to more accurately reflect the performance of your store listings. These two new metrics are now reported with hourly intervals and are available via email notifications, letting you see results faster and track performance better.

Country targeted store listings allow you to tailor your app's store listing to appeal to users in different countries. You can customize the app title, icon, descriptions and graphic assets, allowing you to better appeal to users in specific target markets. For example, you can now tailor your store listing with different versions of the English language for users in India versus the United States.

Rewarded ads give players the choice to watch an advertisement in exchange for in-app items. With rewarded ads in Google Play, you can now create and manage rewarded ads through the Google Play Console. No additional SDK integrations are required.

We hope you try some of these new tools and keep sharing ideas so we can make Android and Google Play a better place to grow your business. We are committed to continue improving the platform and building tools that better serve the gaming community.

Get started today by visiting two new resources, a hub for developers interested in creating games on Android and games.withgoogle.com, for developers looking to connect and scale their business across Google. Many of these updates and resources come from community suggestions, so sign up for our monthly newsletter to stay informed.

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Introducing the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the new home for Tekton, Jenkins, Jenkins X and Spinnaker

We're excited to announce that Google is a founding member of the newly formed Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Continuous delivery (CD) is a critical part of modern software development and DevOps practices, and we're excited to collaborate in a vendor-neutral foundation with other industry leaders.

We're also thrilled to announce the contribution of two projects as part of our membership: Tekton, and in collaboration with Netflix, Spinnaker. These donations will enter alongside Jenkins and Jenkins X, providing an exciting portfolio of projects for the CDF to expand upon.

Continuous Delivery Foundation

Currently, the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool landscape is highly fragmented. As companies migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure, tooling decisions become increasingly complicated and difficult. DevOps practitioners constantly seek guidance on software delivery best practices and how to secure their software supply chains but gathering this information can be difficult. Enter the CDF.

The CDF is about more than just code. Modern application development brings new challenges around security and compliance. This foundation will work to define the practices and guidelines that, together with tooling, will help application developers everywhere deliver better and more secure software at speed.

At a foundation level, the CDF will help make CI/CD tooling easier. And at a project level, Tekton helps address complexity problems at their core. We will team up with the open source community and industry leaders to design and build the critical pieces common to CI/CD systems.

Tekton

Tekton is a set of shared, open source components for building CI/CD systems. It provides a flexible, extensible workflow that accommodates deployment to Kubernetes, VMs, bare metal, mobile or even emerging use cases.

The project’s goal is to provide industry specifications for pipelines, workflows, source code access and other primitives. It modernizes the continuous delivery control plane by leveraging all of the built-in scaling, reliability, and extensibility advantages of Kubernetes, and moves software deployment logic there. Tekton was initially built as a part of Knative, but given its stand-alone power, and ability to deploy to a variety of targets, we’ve decided to separate its functionality out into a new project.

Today, Tekton includes primitives for pipeline definition, source code access, artifact management, and test execution. The project roadmap includes adding support for results and event triggering in the coming months. We also plan to work with CI/CD vendors to build out an ecosystem of components that will allow you to use Tekton with existing tools like Jenkins X, Knative and others.

Spinnaker

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform originally created by Netflix and jointly led by Netflix and Google. It is typically used in organizations at scale, where DevOps teams support multiple development teams, and has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams and in millions of deployments.

Spinnaker is a multi-component system that conceptually aligns with Tekton, and that includes many features important to making continuous delivery reliable, including support for advanced deployment strategies, and Kayenta, an open source canary analysis service.

Given Google’s significant contributions to both Tekton and Spinnaker, we’re very pleased to see them become part of the same foundation. Spinnaker’s large user community has a great deal of experience in the continuous delivery domain, and joining the CDF provides a great opportunity to share that expertise with the broader community.

Next Steps

To learn more about the CDF, listen to this week's Kubernetes Podcast from Google, where the guest is Tracy Miranda, Director of Open Source Community from our partner CloudBees.

If you'd like to participate in the future of Tekton, Spinnaker, or the CDF, please join us in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20th at the Continuous Delivery Summit ahead of KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as there will be many opportunities to get involved and become a part of the community.

We look forward to working with the continuous delivery community on shaping the next wave of CI/CD innovations, alignments, and improvements, no matter where your applications are delivered to.

By Dan Lorenc and Kim Lewandowski, DevOps at Google Cloud

Introducing Season of Docs

Google Open Source is delighted to announce Season of Docs, a new program which fosters the open source contributions of technical writers.

Season of Docs brings technical writers and open source projects together for a few months to work on open source documentation. 2019 is the first time we’re running this exciting new program.

Join us in making a substantive contribution to open source software development around the world.

Fostering collaboration between open source projects and technical writers

The Open Source Survey showed that documentation is highly valued in open source communities, yet there’s little good documentation out there. Why? Because creating documentation is hard. But...

There are people who know how to do docs well. Technical writers know how to structure a documentation site so that people can find and understand the content. They know how to write docs that fit the needs of their audience. Technical writers can also help optimize a community’s processes for open source contribution and on-boarding new contributors.

During Season of Docs, technical writers will spend a few months working closely with open source communities. Each writer works with their chosen open source project. The writers bring their expertise to the projects’ documentation while at the same time learning about open source and new technologies.

Mentors from participating open source organizations share knowledge of their communities’ processes and tools. Together the technical writers and mentors build a new doc set, improve the structure of the existing docs, develop a much-needed tutorial, or improve contribution processes and guides. See more ideas for technical writing projects.

By working together in Season of Docs we raise awareness of open source, of docs, and of technical writing.

How does it work?

  • April 2-23: Open source organizations apply to take part in Season of Docs
  • April 30: Google publishes the list of accepted mentoring organizations, along with their ideas for documentation projects
  • April 30 - June 28: Technical writers choose the project they’d like to work on and submit their proposals to Season of Docs 
  • July 30: Google announces the accepted technical writer projects
  • August 1 - September 1: Community bonding: Technical writers get to know mentors and the open source community, and refine their projects in collaboration with their mentors
  • September 2 - November 29: Technical writers work with open source mentors on the accepted projects, and submit their work at the end of the period
  • December 10: Google publishes the list of  successfully-completed projects.
See the timeline for details, including the provision for projects that run longer than three months.

Join us

Explore the Season of Docs website at g.co/seasonofdocs to learn more about participating in the program. Use our logo and other promotional resources to spread the word. Examine the timeline, check out the FAQ, and get ready to apply!

By Sarah Maddox, Google Technical Writer and Andrew Chen, Google Open Source

And the Google Summer of Code 2019 mentor organizations are…

We are excited to announce the open source projects and organizations that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019, the 15th year of the program! As usual, we received more applications this year than we did last year, about twice as many as we are able to accept into the program.

After careful review, we have chosen 207 open source projects to be mentor organizations this year, 28 of which are new to the program. Please see the program website for a complete list of the accepted organizations.

Are you a student interested in participating? We begin accepting student applications on Monday, March 25, 2019 at 18:00 UTC and the deadline to apply is Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

The most successful applications come from students who start preparing now. You can start by watching the short video below, checking out the Student Guide, and reviewing the list of accepted organizations and reaching out to the 2 or 3 that interest you the most now - before the application period begins.


You can find more information on our website, including a full timeline of important dates. We also highly recommend perusing the FAQ and Program Rules and watching the short videos with more details about GSoC for students and mentors.

A hearty congratulations–and thank you–to all of our mentor organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during Google Summer of Code 2019.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Seeking open source projects for Google Summer of Code 2019

Do you lead or represent a free or open source software organization? Are you seeking new contributors? (Who isn’t?) Do you enjoy the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers? Apply to be a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2019!

We are searching for open source projects and organizations to participate in the 15th annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a global program that draws university student developers from around the world to contribute to open source. Each student spends three months working on a coding project, with the support of volunteer mentors, for participating open source organizations from late May to August.

Last year 1,264 students worked with 206 open source organizations. Organizations include individual smaller and medium sized open source projects as well as a number of umbrella organizations with many sub-projects under them (Python Software Foundation, CERN, Apache Software Foundation).

You can apply to be a mentoring organization for GSoC starting today. The deadline to apply is February 6 at 20:00 UTC. Organizations chosen for GSoC 2019 will be publicly announced on February 26.

Please visit the program site for more information on how to apply and review the detailed timeline of important deadlines. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Guide and our short video on why open source projects choose to apply to be a part of the program.

Best of luck to all of the project applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

The big reveal: Google Code-in 2018 winners and finalists

Our 9th consecutive year of Google Code-in (GCI) 2018 ended in mid-December. It was a very, very busy seven weeks for everyone – we had 3,124 students from 77 countries completing 15,323 tasks with a record 27 open source organizations!

Today, we are pleased to announce the Google Code-in 2018 Grand Prize Winners and Finalists with each organization. The 54 Grand Prize Winners from 19 countries completed an impressive 1,668 tasks between them while also helping other students during the contest.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners are invited to a four day trip to Google’s main campus and San Francisco offices in Northern California where they’ll meet Google engineers, meet one of the mentors they worked with during the contest, and enjoy some fun in California with the other winners. We look forward to seeing everyone later this year!
Country # of Winners Country # of Winners
Cameroon 1 Romania 1
Canada 1 Russian Federation 1
Czech Republic 1 Singapore 1
Georgia 1 South Africa 1
India 18 Spain 2
Indonesia 1 Sri Lanka 1
Macedonia 1 Ukraine 2
Netherlands 1 United Kingdom 6
Philippines 1 United States 9
Poland 4

Finalists

And a big congratulations to our 108 Finalists from 26 countries who completed over 2,350 tasks during the contest. The Finalists will all receive a special hoodie to commemorate their achievements in the contest. This year we had 1 student named as a finalist with 2 different organizations!

A breakdown of the countries represented by our finalists can be found below. 
Country # of Finalists Country # of Finalists
Canada 6 Philippines 1
China 2 Poland 15
Czech Republic 1 Russian Federation 2
Germany 1 Serbia 1
India 48 Singapore 2
Indonesia 2 South Korea 1
Israel 1 Spain 1
Kazakhstan 1 Sri Lanka 2
Luxembourg 1 Taiwan 1
Mauritius 2 Thailand 1
Mexico 1 United Kingdom 3
Nepal 1 United States 8
Pakistan 2 Uruguay 1

Mentors

This year we had 790 mentors dedicate their time and invaluable expertise to helping thousands of teenage students learn about open source by welcoming them into their communities. These mentors are the heart of GCI and the reason the contest continues to thrive. Mentors spend hundreds of hours answering questions, reviewing submitted tasks, and teaching students the basics and, in many cases, more advanced aspects of contributing to open source. GCI would not be possible without their enthusiasm and commitment.

We will post more statistics and fun stories that came from GCI 2018 here on the Google Open Source Blog over the next few months, so please stay tuned.

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalists, and all of the students who spent the last couple of months learning about, and contributing to, open source. We hope they will continue their journey in open source!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2018

We are excited to announce the conclusion of the 9th annual Google Code-in (GCI), our global online contest introducing teenagers to the world of open source development. Over the years the contest has not only grown bigger, but also helped find and support talented young people around the world.

Here are some initial statistics about this year’s program:
  • Total number of students completing tasks: 3,123*
  • Total number of countries represented by students: 77
  • Percentage of girls among students: 17.9% 
Below you can see the total number of tasks completed by students year over year:
*These numbers will increase as mentors finish reviewing the final work submitted by students this morning.
Mentors from each of the 27 open source organizations are now busy reviewing the last  work submitted by participants. We look forward to sharing more statistics about the program, including countries and schools with the most student participants, in an upcoming blog post.

The mentors for each organization will spend the next couple of weeks selecting four Finalists (who will receive a hoodie too!) and their two Grand Prize Winners. Grand Prize Winners will be flown to Northern California to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, meet their mentors and hear talks from Google engineers.

Hearty congratulations to all the student participants for challenging themselves and making contributions to open source in the process!

Further, we’d like to thank the mentors and the organization administrators for GCI 2018. They are the heart of this program, volunteering countless hours creating tasks, reviewing student work, and helping bring students into the world of open source. Mentors teach young students about the many facets of open source development, from community standards and communicating across time zones to version control and testing. We couldn’t run this program without you! Thank you!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists on January 7, 2019!

By Saranya Sampat, Google Open Source

Google joins the OpenChain Project for license compliance

Google is thrilled to announce that we are joining the OpenChain Project as Platinum Members. OpenChain is an effort to make open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. We will also join the OpenChain board and are excited that Facebook and Uber will be fellow board members.

Over the last 14 years, the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) at Google has developed rigorous policies and processes so that we can do open source license compliance correctly, and at scale. This helps us use free and open source software extensively across the company and makes it easier to upstream our work. For us, it’s a matter of legal compliance as well as showing respect for the amazing communities that create and maintain the software.

Until now, there’s been no commonly accepted standard for open source compliance within an organization. Most organizations, like Google, have had to invent and cobble together policies and processes, occasionally comparing notes and hoping we haven’t forgotten anything.

The OpenChain Project is changing that by defining the core requirements of a quality compliance program and developing curriculum to help with training and management. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this work now that open source is a critical input at every step in the supply chain, both in hardware and software.

Google believes in this mission and is excited for the opportunity to use what we’ve learned to pave the way for the rest of the industry. We can help guide the development of standards that are rigorous, clear, and easy to follow for companies both large and small.

By Max Sills and Josh Simmons, Google Open Source