Tag: gsoc

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Let’s welcome our new interns!

It is that time of the year again when we get to meet our new interns participating in both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. This year the GNOME Project is proud to sponsor two Outreachy internships for the May-August season and to mentor 12 students in GSoC 2021!

Our Outreachy projects are listed here, and you can find our GSoC projects here.

Our interns have received an email with instructions for the community bonding period, and you will start seeing their blog posts appearing in Planet GNOME very soon. Make sure you say “hello” and make them feel welcome in our project. Keep in mind that beyond the project’s tasks, we want them to become long-term contributors and, later on, Foundation members. You also will have a chance to get to know about their projects during our Intern Lightning Talks at GUADEC.

If you have any doubt about our participation in these programs, feel free to contact the GNOME GSoC admins or join the #soc channel.

Happy hacking!

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Student applications for Google Summer of Code 2021 are now open!

It’s that time of the year when we see an influx of students interested in Google Summer of Code.

Some students may need some pointers to where to get started. I would like to ask GNOME contributors to be patient with the student’s questions and help them find where to get started.

Point them at https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/Students for overall information regarding the program and our project proposals. Also, help them find mentors through our communication channels.

Many of us have been Outreachy/GSoC interns and the positive experiences we had with our community were certainly an important factor making us long-term contributors.

If you have any doubts, you can ask them in the #soc channel or contact GNOME GSoC administrators.

Happy hacking!

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GSoC 2021: GNOME Foundation has been accepted as a mentor organization!

gsoc logo

 

Yay! We are participating in GSoC once again this year and our org features in the list of this year’s accepted organizations.

If you have any doubt about GSoC, feel free to contact us on #soc IRC/Matrix, email, or Discourse.

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Summertime sadness (GSoC is over, so what’s next?)

Another summer is about to end and with it comes the autumn* with its typical leaf loss. There’s beauty to the leaves falling and turning yellow/orange, but there’s also an association with melancholia. The possibilities and opportunities of the summer are perceived to be gone, and the chill of the winter is on the horizon.

The weather changes set in at the same time our Google Summer of Code season comes to an end this year. For a couple of years, I have planned to write this blog post to our GSoC alumni, and considering the exceptional quality of our projects this year, I feel that another GSoC can’t go without me finally taking a shot at writing this.

Outreachy and GSoC have been critical to various free and open source communities such as ours. By empowering contributors to spend a few months working fulltime in our projects we are not only benefiting from the features that interns are implementing but also having a chance to recruit talent that will continue pushing our project forward as generations pass.

“Volunteer time isn’t fungible” is a catchphrase but there’s lots of truth to it. Many people cannot afford to contribute to FOSS in their free time. Inequality is on the rise everywhere and job security is a privilege. We cannot expect that interns are going to continue delivering with the same bandwidth if they need to provide for themselves, their families, and/or work towards financial stability. Looking at ways to fund contributors is not a new discussion. Our friends at Tidelift and GitHub have been trying to tackle the problem from various fronts. Either making it easier for people to donate to volunteers and/or helping volunteers get fulltime jobs, the truth is that we are still far from sustainability.

So, if you are a mentor, please take some time to reflect on the reasons why your intern won’t continue participating in the project after the internship period ends and see what you can do to help them continue.

Some companies allow their employees to work in FOSS technologies and our alumni have a proven record of their contributions that can definitely help them land entry-level jobs. Therefore referring interns to job opportunities within your company might be a great way to help. Some companies prioritize candidates referred by fellow employees, so your referral can be of great help.

If you are an intern, discuss with us and with your mentor about your next steps. Reflect on your personal goals and on whether you want to build a career in FOSS. My personal advice is to be persistent. Lots of doors will close, but possibly the right one will open. You have a great advantage of having GSoC/Outreachy on your resume and a proven record of your contributions out in the open. Expand your portfolio by contributing bits that are important to you, and eventually recognition may come.

All in all, a career in FOSS isn’t guaranteed, and as branches grow in different ways, remember that the trunk still holds them together. Your roots are in GNOME and we are very proud to see our alumni thrive in the world, even far away from us.

*at least if you live outside the tropics, but that’s a topic I want to address on another blog post: the obstacles to a career in FOSS if you are coming from the global south.

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Let’s welcome our 2020 GSoC interns!

It is Google Summer of Code season again and this year the GNOME project is lucky to have 14 new interns working on various projects ranging from improvements in our app ecosystem to core components and infrastructure.

The first period, from May 4 to June 1, is the Community Bonding period. Interns are expected to flock into our communication channels, ask questions, and get to know our project’s culture. Please, join me in welcoming our students and making sure they feel at home in our community.

This year we will be using Discourse as our main communication channel regarding the program, therefore if you are a mentor or intern, please make sure to check https://discourse.gnome.org/c/community/outreach for announcements. Feel free to create new topics if you have any questions. The GNOME GSoC admins will be monitoring the Outreach category and answering any doubts you might have.

Here is the list of interns and their respective projects https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5428225724907520/#projects

Tips for students

First of all, congratulations! This is just the beginning of your GNOME journey. Our project is almost 23 years old and likely older than some of you, but our community gets constantly renewed with new contributors passionate about software freedom. I encourage you to take some time to watch the recordings of Jonathan Blandford’s “The History of GNOME” talk in GUADEC 2017 so you can grasp how we have grown and evolved since 1997.

The first thing you want to do after celebrating your project’s acceptance is to contact your mentor (if they haven’t contacted you first).

Second, introduce yourself on our “Say Hello” topic! Don’t forget to mention that you are in GSoC 2020, the project you will be working on, and who’s your mentor.

Third, set up a blog where you will be logging your progress and talking directly to the broader community. In case you need help with that, ask your mentors or the GSoC admins. Intern blogs get added to Planet GNOME, which is a feed aggregator of posts written by dozens of GNOME Foundation members.

Many of us read Planet GNOME daily! Besides, some of our active contributors have participated as interns in past editions of GSoC. You can dig for their blogposts and get a better sense of how these progress reports are written.

It is totally normal for you to have questions and doubts about the program, to help with that, we will be hosting a Q&A on May 12 at 17:00 UTC in our RocketChat channel. All of you will receive an invitation by email this week too. If you can’t make it, feel free to join the channel at any time and ask questions there as well.

If during your internship you have a problem with your mentor (lack of communication, or misunderstandings, or deep disagreements, or
anything else), don’t hesitate to report that to the GNOME GSoC administrators.

Last but not least, have fun!

 

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#GSoC: midterm evaluations

They say time goes faster when you are having fun. This first-half of GSoC has passed in a blink of eye, really! Despite having a hard time conciliating GSoC with my university duties, this period is definitely something I would love to experience again.

During this first-half of the program my mentor (Cosimo Cecchi) has been so patient in helping me toward achieving my goals and has been always available to answer my doubts. Grazzie Dude!! 🙂

So, let’s face the second-half of the Summer! o/
Cheers,

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#GSoC Report II

Hello everyone!

I’m a little late on my report, but [finally] it’s here now. It’s been hard to conciliate college and GSoC but I’m making good progress on my task.

As I told you before, my first task is to make Tracker capable of indexing files on removable devices on an application basis (on demand). It means making the Tracker API easily capable of receiving calls from applications to index a given device.

Currently, Tracker uses a GSettings key to flag whether or not removable devices and optical discs should be indexed. In these first 3 weeks I’ve worked on a mechanism to escape the strict duality dictated by these GSettings keys.

I’m working on building a method for tracker-miner-fs which receives a GMount object as a parameter, adds this GMount to the Tracker Store, and call the indexer to perform its job.

The next step is to tie these mechanisms up to the DBus name of the calling application in order to finally make it work on an application basis (on demand).

You can hit me anytime on IRC. Let me know if you have doubts/questions/suggestions.

bye!