Google Summer of Code 2021 is open for mentor organization applications!

With the new year comes the start of our 17th edition of Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! Right now open source projects and organizations can apply to participate as mentoring organizations for the students in the 2021 program. GSoC is a global program that draws student developers (18 years old and over) from around the world to contribute to open source projects. This year, from June 7th to August 16th, each student will spend 10 weeks working on a coding project with the support of volunteer mentors from participating open source organizations.

Does your open source project want to learn more about becoming a mentoring organization? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn about what it means to be a mentor organization, how to prepare your community (hint: have plenty of enthusiastic mentors!), creating appropriate project ideas (that will be ~175 hour projects for the student), and tips for preparing your application.

We welcome all types of organizations and are very eager to involve first-time organizations with a 2021 goal of accepting 40 new orgs. We encourage veteran organizations to refer other organizations they think would be a good fit to participate in GSoC as well.

Last year, 1,106 students completed the program under the guidance of over 2,000 mentors from 198 open source organizations. Many types of open source organizations are involved in GSoC, from small and medium sized open source organizations to larger, umbrella organizations with many sub-projects under them (Python Software Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, etc.). Some organizations are relatively young (less than 2 years old), while other organizations have been around for 20+ years.

You can apply to be a mentoring organization for GSoC starting today on the program site. The deadline to apply is February 19th at 19:00 UTC. We will publicly announce the organizations chosen for GSoC 2021 on March 9th.

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 want to be a part of the GSoC program.

Good luck to all open source mentoring organization applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2020: Learning Together

In its 16th year of the program, we are pleased to announce that 1,106 students from 65 countries have successfully completed Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020! These student projects are the result of three months of collaboration between students, 198 open source organizations, and over 2,000 mentors from 67 countries.

During the course of the program what we learned was most important to the students was the ability to learn, mentorship, and community building. From the student evaluations at the completion of the program, we collected additional statistics from students about the GSoC program, where we found some common themes. The word cloud below shows what mattered the most to our students, and the larger the word in the cloud, the more frequently it was used to describe mentors and open source.

Valuable insights collected from the students:

• 94% of students think that GSoC helped their programming
• 96% of students would recommend their GSoC mentors
• 94% of students will continue working with their GSoC organization
• 97% of students will continue working on open source
• 27% of students said GSoC has already helped them get a job or internship

The GSoC program has been an invaluable learning journey for students. In tackling real world, real time implementations, they've grown their skills and confidence by leaps and bounds. With the support and guidance from mentors, they’ve also discovered that the value of their work isn’t just for the project at hand, but for the community at large. As newfound contributors, they leave the GSoC program enriched and eager to continue their open source journey.

Throughout its 16 years, GSoC continues to ignite students to carry on their work and dedication to open source, even after their time with the program has ended. In the years to come, we look forward to many of this year’s students paying it forward by mentoring new contributors to their communities or even starting their own open source project. Such lasting impact cannot be achieved without the inspiring work of mentors and organization administrators. Thank you all and congratulations on such a memorable year!

By Romina Vicente, Project Coordinator for the Google Open Source Programs Office

New Case Studies About Google’s Use of Go

Go started in September 2007 when Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and I began discussing a new language to address the engineering challenges we and our colleagues at Google were facing in our daily work. The software we were writing was typically a networked server—a single program interacting with hundreds of other servers—and over its lifetime thousands of programmers might be involved in writing and maintaining it. But the existing languages we were using didn't seem to offer the right tools to solve the problems we faced in this complex environment.

So, we sat down one afternoon and started talking about a different approach.

When we first released Go to the public in November 2009, we didn’t know if the language would be widely adopted or if it might influence future languages. Looking back from 2020, Go has succeeded in both ways: it is widely used both inside and outside Google, and its approaches to network concurrency and software engineering have had a noticeable effect on other languages and their tools.

Go has turned out to have a much broader reach than we had ever expected. Its growth in the industry has been phenomenal, and it has powered many projects at Google.

Credit to Renee French for the gopher illustration.

The earliest production uses of Go inside Google appeared in 2011, the year we launched Go on App Engine and started serving YouTube database traffic with Vitess. At the time, Vitess’s authors told us that Go was exactly the combination of easy network programming, efficient execution, and speedy development that they needed, and that if not for Go, they likely wouldn’t have been able to build the system at all.

The next year, Go replaced Sawzall for Google’s search quality analysis. And of course, Go also powered Google’s development and launch of Kubernetes in 2014.

In the past year, we’ve posted sixteen case studies from end users around the world talking about how they use Go to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale. Today, we are adding three new case studies from teams inside Google:

• Core Data Solutions: Google’s Core Data team replaced a monolithic indexing pipeline written in C++ with a more flexible system of microservices, the majority of them written in Go, that help support Google Search.
• Google Chrome: Mobile users of Google Chrome in lite mode rely on the Chrome Optimization Guide server to deliver hints for optimizing page loads of well-known sites in their geographic area. That server, written in Go, helps deliver faster page loads and lowered data usage to millions of users daily.
• Firebase: Google Cloud customers turn to Firebase as their mobile and web hosting platform of choice. After joining Google, the team completely migrated its backend servers from Node.js to Go, for the easy concurrency and efficient execution.

We hope these stories provide the Go developer community with deeper insight into the reasons why teams at Google choose Go, what they use Go for, and the different paths teams took to those decisions.

If you’d like to share your own story about how your team or organization uses Go, please contact us.

By Rob Pike, Distinguished Engineer

Why Diversity is Important in Open Source: Google's Sponsorship of OSSEU

The Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference is taking place in Lyon, France, which the Google Open Source Programs Office is sponsoring. The Linux Foundation supports shared technology through open source, while the conference provides a space for developers and technologists in open source to meet, network, and share knowledge with one another in order to advance the community. Why is this of utmost importance to Google OSS? Google has been rooted in the open source community for many years, supporting programs, projects, and organizations to help advance open source software and technology—we understand the necessity of sustaining open source and the developer community in order to advance technology as a whole.

Sponsoring OSSEU is more than just providing funds, but really pushing the diversity initiative in open source. We need diversity across all levels in open source whether it’s contributors, maintainers, doc writers, or anyone supporting the project. As said recently by the Open Source Initiative, “Many perspectives makes better software.” Having previously funded diversity initiatives such as scholarships or lunches at OSS conferences, Google continues to support this cause by sponsoring the diversity lunch at OSSEU.

In particular, sessions and events that Google will be hosting while at OSSEU include a keynote on Documentation by Megan Byrd-Sanicki and the Women in Open Source Lunch, both on Tuesday, October 29, 2019. The keynote on Docs highlights the importance of doc stars and why their contributions are essential to the growth of the open source community. Our support of the women in open source lunch is especially important as we look to increase the diversity of the open source community, through supporting women and non-binary persons to get more involved and have the opportunity to connect with each other at an event of this scale.

If you’re attending OSSEU, stop by the keynote, and we hope to see you at the lunch as well. If you aren’t attending this year, and are interested in getting more involved in the open source community, the summits hosted by the Linux Foundation are one of the best ways to learn more about OSS and meet passionate people involved in different OSS projects and organizations.

By Radha Jhatakia, Google OSPO

Bazel Reaches 1.0 Milestone!

We're excited to announce the first General Availability release of Bazel, an open source build system designed to support a wide variety of programming languages and platforms.

Bazel was born of Google's own needs for highly scalable builds. When we open sourced Bazel back in 2015, we hoped that Bazel could fulfill similar needs in the software development industry. A growing list of Bazel users attests to the widespread demand for scalable, reproducible, and multi-lingual builds. Bazel helps Google be more open too: several large Google open source projects, such as Angular and TensorFlow, use Bazel. Users have reported 3x test time reductions and 10x faster build speeds after switching to Bazel.

With the 1.0 release we’re continuing to implement Bazel's vision:

• Bazel builds are fast and correct. Every build and test run is incremental, on your developers’ machines and on your CI test system.
• Bazel supports multi-language, multi-platform builds and tests. You can run a single command to build and test your entire source tree, no matter which combination of languages and platforms you target.
• Bazel provides a uniform extension language, Starlark, to define builds for any language or platform.
• Bazel works across all major development platforms (Linux, macOS, and Windows).
• Bazel allows your builds to scale—it connects to distributed remote execution and caching services.

The key features of the 1.0 GA release are:

• Semantic Versioning

Starting with Bazel 1.0, we will use semantic versioning for all Bazel releases. For example, all 1.x releases will be backwards-compatible with Bazel 1.0. We will have a window of at least three months between major (breaking) releases. We'll continue to publish minor releases of Bazel every month, cutting from GitHub HEAD.

• Long-Term Support

Long-Term Support (LTS) releases give users confidence that the Bazel team has the capacity and the process to quickly and safely deliver fixes for critical bugs, including vulnerabilities.

• Well-rounded features for Angular, Android, Java, and C++

The new features include end-to-end support for remote execution and caching, and support for standard package managers and third-party dependencies.

New to Bazel? Try the tutorial for your favorite language to get started.

With the 1.0 release we still have many exciting developments ahead of us. Follow our blog or Twitter account for regular updates. Feel free to contact us with questions or feedback on the mailing list, submit feature requests (and report bugs) in our GitHub issue tracker, and join our Slack channel. Finally, join us at the largest-ever BazelCon conference in December 2019 for an opportunity to meet other Bazel users and the Bazel team at Google, see demos and tech talks, and learn more about fast, correct, and large-scale builds.

Last but not least, we wouldn't have gotten here without the continued trust, support, encouragement, and feedback from the community of Bazel users and contributors. Heartfelt thanks to all of you from the Bazel team!

By Dmitry Lomov, Bazel Team

That’s a Wrap for Google Summer of Code 2019

As the 15th year of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) comes to a close, we are pleased to announce that 1,134 students from 61 countries have successfully completed the 2019 program. Congratulations to all of our students and mentors who made this summer’s program so memorable!

Throughout the last 12 weeks, the GSoC students worked eagerly with 201 open source organizations and over 2,000 mentors from 72 countries—learning to work virtually on teams and developing complex pieces of code. The student projects are now public so feel free to take a look at the amazing efforts they put in over the summer.

Many open source communities rely on new perspectives and talent to keep their projects thriving and without student contributions like these, they wouldn’t be able to grow their communities; GSoC students assist in redesigning and enhancing these organizations’ codebases sometimes as first-time contributors not only to the project but to open source! This is just the beginning for GSoC students—many go on to become future mentors and even more become long-term committers and some will start their own open source projects in the years to come

And last but not least, we would like to thank the mentors and organization administrators who make GSoC possible. Their dedication to welcoming new student contributors into their communities is inspiring and vital to grow the open source community. Thank you all!

By Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source