GSoC 2014 Summary and Final Notes

Google Summer of Code 2014 has triumphantly concluded for Drupal as a participating organization. We selected thirteen students (https://groups.drupal.org/node/423558) out of fifty project proposals from around the world and twelve of the projects passed with success. Help us by reviewing each project's code (https://groups.drupal.org/node/442493).

Not only did students dedicate their summer contributing to Drupal, but most importantly they had fun. With Drupal 8 on the horizon, most projects were focused on porting modules many people will utilize everyday. Students worked on a vast array of functionality ranging from porting the Diff module with extensible new options to integrating Disqus comments in Drupal 8. As Drupal's GSoC Organization Admin I personally checked in with all projects to find busy students resolving issues no one had ever encountered and happy to be a part of our open source community. We can only hope that these talented young software engineers stick around.

Student GSoC Experiences:

"My first GSOC Experience and one of the best summers I spent in the past few years." -Umar Ahmad (https://www.drupal.org/u/umar-ahmad)

"The best part of GSoC is the opportunity to be a part of a Open Source community, which is a venture we're unlikely to explore so soon if not for GSoC and to see your hard work put into actual use." -Sachini Aparna Herath (https://www.drupal.org/u/sachini)

"Coding for such a big project as Drupal was a great honour for me. GSoC helped me to discover Drupal community and to make my summer an exciting experience." -Andrei - Marius Dincu (https://www.drupal.org/u/andrei.dincu)

Mentor GSoC Experiences:

"With GSoC, students significantly participated in getting Drupal 8 core and contrib ready. Thank you for making this happen!" - Miro Dietiker (https://www.drupal.org/u/miro_dietiker)

"This was my first GSoC as a mentor and I enjoyed it! The learning curve was quite steep for my student and I felt her pain since many of the APIs she needed were unstable and not documented. In the end she managed to "survive" the learning curve and release a working alpha version of RDF UI module (https://www.drupal.org/project/rdfui)." -Stéphane Corlosquet (https://www.drupal.org/u/scor)

"GSoC provides opportunities that are unseen in the world of Open Source industries. Drupal 8 will thrive, and partly it's due to GSoC and the influx of those students in Drupal. Thanks!" -Nick Veenhof (https://www.drupal.org/u/Nick_vh)

"One can think that only the students learn, it's not always true. Mentors (especially with several years of industry experience) can learn enthusiasm from their students. It was great to work with Lucian." -Aron Navak (https://www.drupal.org/u/aron-novak)

Reunion Summit

Each year Google organizes a "Mentor Summit" after Summer of Code to help summarize the positive and negative experiences in an unconference style weekend of meetings. This year Google is organizing a "10 Year GSoC Reunion" instead of the traditional mentor summit where two delegates from each successfully participating organization are invited. Many past and present participants responded to our post to represent Drupal at the event (https://groups.drupal.org/node/437643). Because of this we decided to select one of our top GSoC Drupal alumni and one of our best students from this summer. We're proud to select Angela Byron (https://www.drupal.org/u/webchick) and Chandan Singh (https://www.drupal.org/u/cs_shadow) to represent Drupal at the 10 Year Reunion in California (https://sites.google.com/site/gsocmentorsummitstudentreunion/home).

Drupal's GSoC team is delighted we're able to send our most qualified alumni to the reunion because no one else deserves this more than webchick to represent Drupal. Angie's story of starting with Drupal working on the Quiz module (http://webchick.net/node/105) as a GSoC student almost ten years ago and becoming one of the most important people in our community is now legendary (learn more @ http://webchick.net/about). In an effort to repeat history, we're excited about Chandan becoming a rockstar developer pushing Drupal to the next level as a promising new contributor. Beginning by leading development of the Entity Embed module as a GSoC student (https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_embed), Chandan continues to be actively involved in Drupal 8 Core development with over 25 commit mentions. It is truly amazing to review the post and commit log from a user only 6 months old (https://www.drupal.org/user/2828287/track/) and realize our opportunity to find multiple success stories similar to webchick and cs_shadow via GSoC.

Thank You!

A big thanks to all the students with mentors who helped make this summer a success and of course the entire Drupal community for their amazing support. Last but certainly not the least, thanks to Google for making it all possible. The entire open source community is forever in debt to the gift Google provides us with Summer of Code. Google has funded at least $66,000USD (12 students x $5500USD) to Drupal alone in 2014.

What's Next?? How Can I Help??

Next we switch our focus from GSoC into Google Code-In 2014 (https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/). Our current need is creating task ideas for Code-In students. If you have great ideas for small tasks taking up to several hours or want to be a mentor, please update our GCI task idea spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sFf5wnuCSkNauNw26-Kml0snplF4Fx0j...).

GCI is a contest for high school students to contribute small tasks to open source organizations to win a trip to GoogleHQ. Our GCI organization application usually opens in October and contest runs from November to January. GCI is a great way to learn the responsibilities of being a mentor prior to GSoC. Join our GCI group (https://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in) to learn more.

It's never too early to start planning for next year's Summer of Code in 2015. Join our GSoC group (https://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code) to learn more and comment in our GSoC 2015 planning post (https://groups.drupal.org/node/437638) and chat with us in real time in #drupal-google on Freenode. If you're attending Drupalcon Amsterdam be sure to attend our BoF (https://groups.drupal.org/node/440663) on Wed Oct 1st at 10:45-11:45 to learn more about our initiatives in person.