Did You Participate In The Google Summer Of Code Event?

[The Simpleton 2]

I can't believe I didn't hear about this event till today - it's been alive for five years already! I wanted to know if any of you over here have participated in this event till now....in 2009 Google spent approximately $5,000,000 to fund open source projects through this event. It's a boon for the student community, who receive a stipend of $5000 if they are approved for a project! Here's a brief intro of this event I got from the official site of 2009 :

 

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We have worked with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 3300 students and more than 5,000 mentors & co-mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

If only I had known about this a little earlier I could have focused my time on learning programming - now I'm feeling that I've wasted the best years of my life I think I can reach the level of this event only in 3-4 years So does anyone have some experience in participating in this event? If so I would love some tips from them - I do hope to make it to this event in the future - oh I'm just so excited!!!

[truefusion 3]

I've known about it, but i don't participate in it. I would rather spend more time working on my projects than trying to figure out how one program or script works just to include a few small things in there. While you could use your knowledge of the program to write documentation instead, i would only do that if i made use of the program or script, saw that its documentation is very lacking to near non-existing, and feel that it should have decent documentation—at least some simple code examples, and i don't mean a "hello world" example; hello world examples tend to be too simple for my taste.

 

Most of the popular programs and scripts have a lot of code already written, so you will be there for a long while trying to figure out its structure.

[phonexia 0]

SAME HEREI ALSO DIDNT KNEW TILL NOW BUT I THINK NOW I WILL KEEP A TRACK ON THIS ALL AND TRY TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS ALL AND ALSO MAKE SOME MONEY AND ALSO MAKE FRIENDSBTW MAY I KNOW FROM WHERE TO KEEP THIS THINGS IN A NEWSLETTER

[Dak1ng 0]

I didn't know that this took place. I also didn't know google had their own programming language. I am so behind...

[The Simpleton 2]

I didn't know that this took place. I also didn't know google had their own programming language. I am so behind...

No problem - it's never too late to catch up Google's Summer of Code 2010 should begin in March or somewhere near so keep a look out for that!

[legend112 0]

I've known about it for a while now but just didn't have the motivation to seriously focus on one project. I sure do hope to take part in it one day, as for now, i would rather concentrate on learning and developing my SMF site!

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I've known about this group for about a year now but... I don't feel I have the skills necessary to take part. I know basics of many programming languages but I don't know any solid enough to really be helpful to the software community.Although I'm wondering if the mentors could help with that. Through all the tutorials and classes I've taken on programming they always teach everything in the "this is the theory of how you will do it" type, not in the real-world type. For example, you will learn how to make arrays, but you won't learn how to implement those successfully into games or things like satellite-inclusion programs or anything. At the end of the day that stuff can only be learned through hands-on experience.