It’s that time of year, where post-secondary students get to apply to their favorite open source organization for Google Summer of Code (GSOC). Essentially, Google pays students to hack on open source projects over the summer, which is just amazing.
As a student, you get a stipend of of $5000 USD and the respective mentoring organization gets $500. Students have from March 26th through April 6th to apply to the mentoring organizations that they are interested in. Afterwards, the mentoring organizations rank and review the proposals. Finally, the accepted proposals are announced on April 23rd.
If you qualify (you’re a student and older than 18) and have some coding skills, I highly recommend you consider doing GSOC as it’s a great way to learn something, get some experience and even get a job potentially. I recommend looking over the list of mentoring organizations. I’m excited this year because Twitter is a mentoring organization and we will have some students work on some of our open source projects. Of course, the Eclipse Foundation is participating and has a great list of project ideas.
In the end, if you’re a student, just do it if you don’t have anything else crazy lined up. You get to work with quality mentoring organizations that have been vetted as great places to get started on working on open source.