It’s official: Kiwix will be mentoring students as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the 4th year in a row, next to the likes of Qemu, the Python Foundation and many, many others: check them out here!
What is new this year?
Google’s requirements have changed slightly in the sense that each project should be completed / completable within 175 hours of work over a 10-week period (so pretty much a part-time job; and, yes, this is of course a paid internship). With a coding period of 10 weeks, there’s even a bit of room for a break somewhere in the middle (if there are exams, for instance).
Anyone above the age of 18 is eligible as long as they are enrolled in a post-secondary program (college, university, e.g. anything above high-school).
The new list of projects for this year at Kiwix is available here: there’s a bit of everything for everyone and every range of skills, but remember that we’re totally welcoming of new ideas: as a matter of fact, four of the five last students we’ve had came up with their own project ideas.
What is not new?
Google Summer of Code is a very, very competitive thing – not because it’s hard in itself, but because there are only so many spots available for a lot of applicants.
How do we select these happy few? To be honest, a good proposal is nice but we first want to see the quality of your code (meaning there are no bugs, of course, but the also code does solve an actual issue or improves an existing process). It’s easy to spot whether people understand what they are doing, and why they are doing it this way. We can therefore only recommend prospective applicants to spend 10 minutes understanding what offline access is, what situations could be that require offline access, and how you would go about solving this problem (and make the world a better place for 4 billion people).
Here’s where we explain how to craft a great application. You can also look at this walkthrough of do’s and don’t.
Good luck!