Tag Archives: internships

How Google’s 2020 summer interns became the newest contributors in open source

Our internship program changed in structure this year to accommodate a virtual environment, and we enjoyed seeing the intern involvement in our open source teams. Now, as the Summer 2020 Interns have departed Google, we’ve seen widespread impact across these OSS projects. Some accomplishments from the intern community included:
  • Mohamed Ibrahim, a Software Engineering major at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, interned on the Earth Engine team in Geo. He built a web app from scratch that allows Earth Engine developers, who are primarily climate and remote-sensing researchers, to build rich UIs for their Earth Engine Apps without needing to write any code. Mohamed also learned two coding languages unfamiliar to him, enabling him to write over 10,000 lines of TypeScript, 480 lines of Go, and merge over 30 PRs during one internship.
App creator demo
Web app demo
  • Vismita Uppalli, a Cloud intern and Computer Science major at the University of Virginia, wrote a tutorial showing how to use AI Platform Operators on Apache Airflow, which is now published in the official Airflow docs.
  • Colin Marsch interned with the Android team and published a blog post for Android developers, "Re-writing the AOSP DeskClock App in Kotlin," which has reached over 1,600 viewers! He is scheduled to graduate from the University of Waterloo with a major in Computer Science in Spring 2021.
  • Satyam Ralhan worked in the MyHeart team in Research to build a first-of-its-kind Android app that engages users in conversations to encourage healthy habits. He created a demo, which explores the different phases of the app and how it learns to personalize lifestyle suggestions for various kinds of users. He is in his fourth year at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, studying Computer Science and Engineering.
    MyHeart app demo
  • An Apigee intern, Nicole Gizzo, presented her work analyzing API vocabularies at the API Specifications Conference. She is majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and will graduate in May 2021.
  • The OSS Fuzzing Interns have found and reported over 600 bugs to critical open source projects like the Linux kernel and Nginx, over 100 of which were security vulnerabilities.
  • Madelyn Dubuk, a SWE Intern on the Cloud DPE team and a Computer Science major at USC, worked with three other interns to create a full stack web app to help better understand test flakiness, and enjoyed working directly with other interns.
Initial feedback from our interns indicates that their OSS contributions won’t stop when their internships end. Of the interns who worked on OSS projects, 69% plan to continue contributing to OSS, enjoying the ability to talk about their work and have a broader impact. Beyond the impact on OSS, we’ve seen tremendous professional growth for our interns. Lucia Cantu-Miller, an intern on the Chrome team and Computer Science major at ITESM Monterrey, reflected she was, “proud of seeing how I’ve grown during the internship. As the days passed I became more confident in my work and in asking questions, I have grown a lot as a person and as a professional student.” Lucia wasn’t the only intern to experience this as 98% of interns who worked on OSS feel that Google is a good place to start a career. The success of this summer’s Internship is due in large part to the many contributions of Google’s OSS community—from the intern hosts to the project champions and mentors—we can’t thank them enough for their support. 

By Emma Stamp, Google Engineering Education

Welcoming 1,000+ Interns to Open Source at Google

One of the core tenets of open source is about finding ways for people to build great things by working together, regardless of location. This summer, through our intern program we’re gathering incredible talent from schools around the world, Googlers with a passion for open source, and project maintainers both inside and outside of Google to see what we can build together. 

Onboarding that many interns and turning them into new open source contributors was no easy task. So in partnership with the Intern Programs team and engineering teams across Google, we’ve grounded our planning by answering four key questions. 

How can we make our internship program a force for good in the open source ecosystem?

We knew that having more than a thousand interns contribute to open source projects could have a huge impact, however, many projects aren’t set up to onboard dozens of new contributors at one time and many maintainers can’t take on hundreds of new pull requests. Early on, we established best practices for intern placement and support. We committed to:
  • Aligning interns’ work with project priorities to advance the project while also allowing the interns to learn and grow their skills.
  • Proactively communicating with project maintainers and contributors, keeping them in the loop on timelines and logistics.
  • Looking beyond Google. While we prioritized projects that have full-time Google engineerings support. That includes Google-owned projects like Go, TensorFlow, and Chromium, as well as Google-created projects we invest heavily in, such as Kubernetes, Apache Beam, and Tekton. But Google also has full-time engineers working on outside projects we rely on, so our interns will also be working on projects like Envoy, Rust, and Apache Maven.

How can we introduce the interns to open source at Google?

We are determined to support and empower the interns as they become lifelong contributors to open source. Every Noogler in engineering learns about using and contributing to open source in a training run by our Open Source Programs Office. With an unprecedented number of interns working on open source projects, we are also providing additional resources; from offering a platform for questions, office hours, enrichment talks, and partnerships with external open source organizations.

How can we learn from our interns about the experience of contributing to open source at Google and beyond?

We see a huge opportunity to listen to our interns this summer. By meeting with interns and hosts—as well as surveying the entire class of interns at the end of the summer—we can look for ways to improve open source at Google and the contributor experience for projects they’re working on. We’re excited to learn from the internship program and from interns’ perspectives working in and contributing to open source.

How can we have an impact on these students that carries on throughout their careers?

One of my favorite questions to ask Googlers who are active in open source is how they were first introduced to open source. There’s a well-trodden path of a developer fixing an annoying bug, then a few more bugs, then adding small features, becoming a core contributor, and eventually a project maintainer. That process requires persistence and patience, and projects lose a lot of great developers along the way.

But... What if your first experience with open source is being welcomed into a large and thriving community of contributors? What if you get to contribute to open source full time, mentored by creators and maintainers of the project you’re working on, collaborating across organizations and across time zones? Our hope is that this kind of experience will leave a lasting impression on this summer’s interns and that they’ll continue to contribute to open source for a long time to come.

By Jen Phillips, Google Open Source

Welcoming 1,000+ Interns to Open Source at Google

One of the core tenets of open source is about finding ways for people to build great things by working together, regardless of location. This summer, through our intern program we’re gathering incredible talent from schools around the world, Googlers with a passion for open source, and project maintainers both inside and outside of Google to see what we can build together. 

Onboarding that many interns and turning them into new open source contributors was no easy task. So in partnership with the Intern Programs team and engineering teams across Google, we’ve grounded our planning by answering four key questions. 

How can we make our internship program a force for good in the open source ecosystem?

We knew that having more than a thousand interns contribute to open source projects could have a huge impact, however, many projects aren’t set up to onboard dozens of new contributors at one time and many maintainers can’t take on hundreds of new pull requests. Early on, we established best practices for intern placement and support. We committed to:
  • Aligning interns’ work with project priorities to advance the project while also allowing the interns to learn and grow their skills.
  • Proactively communicating with project maintainers and contributors, keeping them in the loop on timelines and logistics.
  • Looking beyond Google. While we prioritized projects that have full-time Google engineerings support. That includes Google-owned projects like Go, TensorFlow, and Chromium, as well as Google-created projects we invest heavily in, such as Kubernetes, Apache Beam, and Tekton. But Google also has full-time engineers working on outside projects we rely on, so our interns will also be working on projects like Envoy, Rust, and Apache Maven.

How can we introduce the interns to open source at Google?

We are determined to support and empower the interns as they become lifelong contributors to open source. Every Noogler in engineering learns about using and contributing to open source in a training run by our Open Source Programs Office. With an unprecedented number of interns working on open source projects, we are also providing additional resources; from offering a platform for questions, office hours, enrichment talks, and partnerships with external open source organizations.

How can we learn from our interns about the experience of contributing to open source at Google and beyond?

We see a huge opportunity to listen to our interns this summer. By meeting with interns and hosts—as well as surveying the entire class of interns at the end of the summer—we can look for ways to improve open source at Google and the contributor experience for projects they’re working on. We’re excited to learn from the internship program and from interns’ perspectives working in and contributing to open source.

How can we have an impact on these students that carries on throughout their careers?

One of my favorite questions to ask Googlers who are active in open source is how they were first introduced to open source. There’s a well-trodden path of a developer fixing an annoying bug, then a few more bugs, then adding small features, becoming a core contributor, and eventually a project maintainer. That process requires persistence and patience, and projects lose a lot of great developers along the way.

But... What if your first experience with open source is being welcomed into a large and thriving community of contributors? What if you get to contribute to open source full time, mentored by creators and maintainers of the project you’re working on, collaborating across organizations and across time zones? Our hope is that this kind of experience will leave a lasting impression on this summer’s interns and that they’ll continue to contribute to open source for a long time to come.

By Jen Phillips, Google Open Source