Expanding Google Summer of Code in 2022

We are pleased to announce that in 2022 we’re broadening our scope of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with exciting new updates to the program.

For 17 years, GSoC has focused on bringing new open source contributors into OSS communities big and small. GSoC has brought over 18,000 university students from 112 countries together with over 17K mentors from 746 open source organizations.

At its heart, GSoC is a mentorship program where people interested in learning more about open source are welcomed into our open source communities by excited mentors ready to help them learn and grow as developers. The goal is to have these new contributors stay involved in open source communities long after their Google Summer of Code program is over.

Over the course of GSoC’s 17 years, open source has grown and evolved, and we’ve realized that the program needs to evolve as well. With that in mind, we have several major updates to the program coming in 2022, aimed at better meeting the needs of our open source communities and providing more flexibility to both projects and contributors so that people from all walks of life can find, join and contribute to great open source communities.

Expanding eligibility

Beginning in 2022, we are opening the program up to all newcomers of open source that are 18 years and older. The program will no longer be solely focused on university students or recent graduates. We realize there are many folks that could benefit from the GSoC program that are at various stages of their career, recent career changers, self-taught, those returning to the workforce, etc. so we wanted to allow these folks the opportunity to participate in GSoC.

We expect many students to continue applying to the program (which we encourage!), yet we wanted to provide excited individuals who want to get into open source—but weren’t sure how to get started or whether open source communities would welcome their newbie contributions—with a place to start.

Many people can benefit from mentorship programs like GSoC and we want to welcome more folks into open source.

Multiple Sizes of Projects

This year we introduced the concept of a medium sized project in response to the many distractions folks were dealing with during the pandemic. This adjustment was beneficial for many participants and organizations but we also heard feedback that the larger, more complex projects were a better fit for others. In the spirit of flexibility, we are going to support both medium sized projects (~175 hours) and large projects (~350 hours) in 2022.

One of our goals is to find ways to get more people from different backgrounds into open source which means meeting people where they are at and understanding that not everyone can devote an entire summer to coding.

Increased Flexibility of Timing for Projects

For 2022, we are allowing for considerable flexibility in the timing for the program. You can spread the project out over a longer period of time and you can even switch to a longer timeframe mid-program if life happens. Rather than a mandatory 12-week program that runs from June – August with everyone required to finish their projects by the end of the 12th week, we are opening it up so mentors and their GSoC Contributors can decide together if they want to extend the deadline for the project up to 22 weeks.

Interested in Applying to GSoC?

We will announce the GSoC 2022 program timeline soon.

Open Source Organizations

Does your open source project want to learn more about how to apply to be a mentoring organization? This is a mentorship program focused on welcoming new contributors into your community and helping them learn best practices that will help them be long term OSS contributors. A key factor is having plenty of mentors excited about teaching newcomers about open source.

Read the mentor guide, to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization, how to prepare your community, creating appropriate project ideas (175 hour and 350 hour projects), and tips for preparing your application.

Want to be a GSoC Contributor?

Are you a potential GSoC Contributor interested in learning how to prepare for the 2022 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. Read through the student/contributor guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in 2022. You can also get inspired by checking out the 199 organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2021, as well as the projects that students worked on.

We encourage you to explore other resources and you can learn more on the program website.

Please spread the word to your friends as we hope these updates to the program will help more excited folks apply to be GSoC Contributors and mentoring organizations in GSoC 2022!

By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager, Google Open Source

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 2021 will bring some changes

Google Open Source is pleased to announce the 2021 cycle of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program, which will be our 17th consecutive year bringing students into open source communities. Over the past 16 years Google Summer of Code has brought over 16,000 student developers from 111 countries into 715 open source organizations big and small.

Some exciting changes are coming to the 2021 GSoC as we make adjustments to add more flexibility into the program for students and mentors alike.

• With the pandemic straining folks’ time we are changing the size of the projects and time commitment students are expected to spend on their projects. Starting in 2021, students will be focused on a 175-hour project over a 10-week coding period.
• As students are learning in many different educational formats in 2020, we are opening up the 2021 program to students 18 years and older who are:
1. Enrolled in post-secondary academic programs (including college, university, masters program, PhD program and/or undergraduate program, or licensed coding school, etc.) as of May 17, 2021; or,
2. Have graduated from a post-secondary academic program between December 1, 2020 and May 17, 2021.

We’re excited that GSoC will be able to continue to thrive as we welcome more students from around the world into open source in 2021! Applications for interested open source project organizations open on January 29th, and student applications open March 29, 2021.

Does your open source project want to learn more about how to apply to be a mentoring organization? This is a mentorship program so having mentors excited about teaching students how to be a part of your community and ready to guide students is key.

Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization, how to prepare your community (hint: have plenty of enthusiastic mentors!), create appropriate project ideas, and tips for preparing your application. We welcome all types of organizations—large and small—and are very eager to involve first time projects. For 2021, we hope to welcome more organizations than ever before and are looking to accept at least 40 into their first GSoC.

Are you a student interested in learning how to prepare for the 2021 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. Read through the student guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in late-March. You can also get inspired by checking out the 198 organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2020, as well as the projects that students worked on.

We encourage you to explore other resources and you can learn more on the program website.

Please spread the word to your friends as we hope these changes will help more excited folks apply to be students and mentoring organizations in GSoC 2021!

By Stephanie Taylor, Program Manager—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

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

Magnificent mentors of Google Summer of Code 2018

Mentors are the heart and soul of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and have been for the last 14 years. Without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code. These volunteers spend 4+ months guiding their students to create the best quality project possible while welcoming them into their communities – answering questions and providing help at all hours of the day, including weekends and holidays.

Thank you mentors and organization administrators! 

Each year we pore over heaps of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2018 crew:

• Registered mentors: 2,819
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 1,996
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 46
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 272
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 627
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 474
• Percentage of new mentors: 36.5%

GSoC 2018 mentors are from all parts of the world, hailing from 75 countries!

If you want to see the stats for all 75 countries check out this list.

Another fun fact about our 2018 mentors: they range in age from 15-80 years old!

• Average mentor age: 34
• Median mentor age: 33
• Mentors under 18 years old: 26*

GSoC mentors help introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development – for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 206 participating organizations to attend our annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of community building, lively debate, learning best practices from one another, working to strengthen open source communities, good food, and lots and lots of chocolate.

Thank you to all of our mentors, organization administrators, and all of the “unofficial” mentors that help in the various open source organization’s communities. Google Summer of Code is a community effort and we appreciate each and every one of you.

Cheers to yet another great year!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

* Most of these 26 young GSoC mentors started their journey in Google Code-in, our contest for 13-17 year olds that introduces young students to open source software development.

Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit

This year Google brought over 320 mentors from all over the world (33 countries!) to Google's offices in Sunnyvale, California for the 2017 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year 149 organizations were represented, which provided the perfect opportunity to meet like-minded open source enthusiasts and discuss ways to make open source better and more sustainable.

Group photo by Dmitry Levin used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

The Mentor Summit is run as an unconference in which attendees create and join sessions based on their interests. “I liked the unconference sessions, that they were casual and discussion based and I got a lot out of them. It was the place I connected with the most people,” said Cassie Tarakajian, attending on behalf of the Processing Foundation.

Attendees quickly filled the schedule boards with interesting sessions. One theme in this year’s session schedule was the challenging topic of failing students. Derk Ruitenbeek, part of the phpBB contingent, had this to say:

“This year our organisation had a high failure rate of 3 out of 5 accepted students. During the Mentor Summit I attended multiple sessions about failing students and rating proposals and got a lot [of] useful tips. Talking with other mentors about this really helped me find ways to improve student selection for our organisation next time.”

This year was the largest Mentor Summit ever – with the exception of our 10 Year Reunion in 2014 – and had the best gender diversity yet. Katarina Behrens, a mentor who worked with LibreOffice, observed:

“I was pleased to see many more women at the summit than last time I participated. I'm also beyond happy that now not only women themselves, but also men engage in increasing (not only gender) diversity of their projects and teams.”

We've held the Mentor Summit for the past 10+ years as a way to meet some of the thousands of mentors whose generous work for the students makes the program successful, and to give some of them and the projects they represent a chance to meet. This year was their first Mentor Summit for 52% of the attendees, giving us a lot of fresh perspectives to learn from!

We love hosting the Mentor Summit and attendees enjoy it, as well, especially the opportunity to meet each other. In fact, some attendees met in person for the first time at the Mentor Summit after years of collaborating remotely! According to Aveek Basu, who mentored for The Linux Foundation, the event was an excellent opportunity for “networking with like minded people from different communities. Also it was nice to know about people working in different fields from bioinformatics to robotics, and not only hard core computer science.” 

You can browse the event website and read through some of the session notes that attendees took to learn a bit more about this year’s Mentor Summit.

Now that Google Summer of Code 2017 and the Mentor Summit have come to a close, our team is busy gearing up for the 2018 program. We hope to see you then!

By Maria Webb, Google Open Source 

The Mentors of Google Summer of Code 2017

Mentors are the bread and butter of our program - without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code (GSoC). These volunteers spend 12 weeks (plus a month of community bonding) tirelessly guiding their students to create the best quality project possible and welcoming them into their communities - answering questions and providing help at all hours.

Each year we pore over oodles of data to extract the most interesting and relevant statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick snapshot of our 2017 group:

• Total mentors: 3,439
• Mentors assigned to an active project: 1,647
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC over 10 years: 22
• Percentage of new mentors: 49%

GSoC 2017 mentors are a worldly group, hailing from 69 countries on 6 continents - we’re still waiting on a mentor from Antarctica… Anyone?

Interested in the data? Check out the full list of countries.

Some interesting factoids about our mentors:

• Average age: 39
• Youngest: 15*
• Oldest: 68
• Most common first name: Michael (there are 40!)

GSoC mentors help to introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development — for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 201 participating organizations to attend the annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of food, community building, lively debate and lots of fun.

Thank you to everyone involved in Google Summer of Code. Cheers to yet another great year!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

* Say what? 15 years old!? Yep! We had 12 GSoC mentors under the age of 18. This group of enthusiastic teens started their journey in our sister program, Google Code-in, an open source coding competition for 13-17 year olds. You can read more about it at g.co/gci.

Google Summer of Code 2016 statistics: celebrating our mentors

Our final statistics post of the year is dedicated to to the incredible Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2016 mentors. There were a total of 2,524 mentors, but today we'll look at the 1,500+ mentors who were assigned to an active project. Mentors are the lifeblood of our program. Without their hard work and dedication to the success of our students, there would be no GSoC. A merry band of volunteers, mentors work with students for more than 12 weeks — remotely, across multiple time zones, giving their time, expertise and guidance in addition to a regular full-time job for an average of 7.45 hours a week. Today we’ll take a closer look at our 2016 team.

GSoC 2016 mentors reside all over the world and represent 66 countries.

Want to see the data? Here’s the breakdown of the countries our mentors come from.

We have many mentors who participate in GSoC year after year. In 2016, we have six mentors who have participated since the program’s inception in 2005! GSoC “lifer” Bart Massey, who participated as a mentor for Portland State University and X.Org had this to say about his time with GSoC:

“I'm not sure which is more astonishing, that I am 12 years older with GSoC or that GSoC is 12 years old with me. Some of the most fantastic, interesting, brilliant and hardworking folks on the planet have gotten together every year for 12 years to change the world: Google folks and open source leadership and skilled, special students. It's been great to get to be part of it all, both as Portland State University and during my time with X.Org...I hope I get to keep working with and hanging out with these people I love every year forever.” 

Awww, we love you too Bart!

There are also plenty of newbies to the program each year and 2016 is no exception. We’d like to welcome 528 (33%) new mentors to the GSoC family.

Some fun facts:

• Average age: 32
• Youngest: 14
• Oldest: 78
• Most common mentor first name: David

At the end of each program year, we invite two mentors from each participating organization to join us at the Mentor Summit, a three day unconference at Google HQ in Northern California. There they enjoy a weekend with their peers to talk about all things open source-y (a technical term) and have some fun.

A huge thanks to each and every Google Summer of Code mentor. We salute you.

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

From Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 3)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

This blog post marks the end of our short series following our adventures in open source. As you may recall, it all started thanks to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which brought our team together. The GSoC collaboration spurred us to start a class at Technical University of Munich (TUM) that eventually took on the Game of Thrones data science project which became an international sensation.

The success of our Game of Thrones project opened a lot of doors. First, we were invited to participate in the Morpheus Cup which is a prestigious university olympiad that brings together students from all over Europe to compete in digital challenges.

Our team rocked the competition winning two challenges and making it to the finalist stage in the third challenge. We were honored to represent our university and grateful for Google’s sponsorship of our team.

The students and mentors of the Game of Thrones project at the Morpheus Cup challenge in May 2016. From left to right: Georgi Anastasov, Emiliyana Kalinova, Maximilian Bandle (all students), Guy Yachdav (mentor), Christian Dallago (mentor), Tobias Piffrader, Theodor Chesleran (both students) and Tatyana Goldberg (mentor).

Another opportunity that followed was an invitation to speak at a TEDx event at TUM on July 28th, 2016. In the event, titled “The Common Extraordinary,” Guy presented our work with data mining as bioinformaticians, sharing how we’ve made the field of data science accessible to our students and how we helped popularize it through the Game of Thrones project.

More speaking engagements are already scheduled: at meetups, coffee talks and conferences where we plan to keep evangelizing data mining and tell the story of our open source adventure.

What’s next? We’re excited to continue as mentors and org admins in GSoC and to carry on teaching data science and JavaScript at the university. In between classes and our daily research work we’re now being asked by friends, family members, colleagues and even strangers whether we can help them use data mining to answer questions on subjects ranging from politics, science, sports and even their personal lives.

Just the other day we were approached with the idea of developing an app that would take in a set of personality traits, process them along with social network data and help in suggesting life decisions: Should I date that person? Should I really take this job? Is Baltimore the city for me?

That interest goes even beyond our personal circles. A recent trade media report pointed out that by using machine learning in an unexpected context, the Game of Thrones project demonstrated the disruptive force of data mining. This force, the article continues, could make an impact on the next industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - where data plays a key role.

Do you have interesting questions you’d like to answer or a data set you’d like to make predictions with? Curious about BioJS or our JavaScript course? Please reach out to us on Twitter or in the comments.

In the near future we dream of starting our own consultancy, as we already have requests from companies that want our help with upcoming data science projects. It seems our team has found its entrepreneurial bent!

We hope enjoyed this trilogy of blog posts, that our story has inspired you and that you too will continue to adventure in open source and collaborative development. If you’re not involved with Google Summer of Code, consider joining. It’s a great way to build up your project and share it with the world. More importantly, it lets you work with amazing people with whom, as we learned, it is possible to reach the sky.

By Tatyana Goldberg, Christian Dallago, and Guy Yachdav, BioJS

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 2)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Don’t miss the first post in the series. Heads up, this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons 5 and 6!

We built on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) philosophy and the lessons we learned from participating in 2014 by starting a JavaScript Technology class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

We began with two dozen students who worked on expanding the BioJS visualization library. Our class became popular quickly and the number of applicants doubled each semester (nearly 180 applicants for 40 seats in the 2016 summer term).

In 2016 our team grew to include Christian Dallago, who had joined as a GSoC mentor. Together we decided to break with tradition of our course’s previous semesters. Instead of focusing on data visualization, we wanted to introduce students to data science with JavaScript. To get our students fully engaged, we decided the project would center on data from the hit TV show, Game of Thrones.

Our aim was to create an online portal for Game of Thrones fans which would:

1. Provide the most comprehensive, structured and open data set about the Game of Thrones world accessible via API.
2. Present an interactive map based on JavaScript.
3. Listen to what people are saying on Twitter about each of the show’s characters.
4. Use machine learning algorithms to predict the likelihood of each character’s death.

Our plan worked — the students were engaged. It was a beautiful sight to see: GitHub repos humming with activity as each dev team delved deeper into their projects. As a project manager, you know you’ve got something good when issues are being opened and closed at 4:00 AM!

The results were mind blowing. In 50 days of programming, 36 students opened over 1,200 issues and pull requests, pushed 3,300 commits, released four apps to NPM, and, of course, produced one absolutely amazing website.

The website amasses data from 2,028 characters. Our map shows 240 landmarks and the paths traveled by 28 characters. Our Twitter sentiment analysis tool analyzed over 3 million tweets. And we launched the first ever machine learning-based prediction algorithm that predicts the likelihood of dying for the 1,451 characters in the show that are still alive.

Visualization of Twitter sentiment analysis data for Jon Snow during season 5 of Game of Thrones. The X axis shows the timeline and the Y axis shows the number of positive (green) and negative (red) tweets. Each tweet is analyzed by an algorithm using a neural network to determine whether the tweet’s writer has a positive, negative or neutral attitude toward the character. 

Since launch, the site’s popularity has skyrocketed. Following our press release, we were covered by over 1,500 media outlets, most notably Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Daily Mail, BBC, Reuters, The Telegraph, CNET and many more. HowStuffWorks, The Vulture and others produced videos about the site and Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show did a segment about us. We've also given countless interviews to TV, radio and newspapers.

Google Analytics for the website. Left chart shows the number of visitors to the website during the first week after launch, reaching over 73K visitors on April 25th. Right chart shows the number of visitors at a given time point during the same week.

The most exciting part of the project was predicting the likelihood that any given character would die using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms find rules and patterns in the data, things that humans cannot obviously and simply detect. Once the rules and patterns are identified, we apply machine learning to make inferences or predictions from novel, previously unseen, data sets.

Warning: The next paragraphs contain spoilers for seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones!

In order to predict the likelihood of a character’s death, we collected information about all of the characters that appeared in books 1 to 5 and analyzed over 30 features, including age, gender, marital status and others. Then we used a support vector machine (SVM) to statistically compare the features of characters, both dead and alive, to predict who would get the axe next. Our prediction was correct for 74% of all cases and surprised us by placing a number of characters thought to be relatively safe in grave danger.

According to our predictions, Jon Snow, who was seemingly betrayed and murdered by fellow members of the Night’s Watch at the end of season 5, had only an 11% chance of dying. Indeed, Jon has risen from the dead in the second episode of season 6! We also predicted that the rulers of Dorn (Doran and Trystane) Martell are at a high likelihood of death and, as predicted, they were taken out in the first episode of the new season.

Of course, as is always the case with predictions, there were also misses. We didn’t expect Roose Bolton to be killed off nor did we see Hodor’s departure coming.

This experience was an amazing ride for our team and it all started with Google Summer of Code! In the next post we’ll share what followed and where we see ourselves heading in the future.

By Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago, BioJS

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.

We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:

• The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
• All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
• Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
• Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
• Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 

You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:

MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:

1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 

Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich