Students: get paid to work on open source projects!
Projects: find new contributors and mentor the next generation!
Python is a popular high-level programming language. It is a general-purpose language used by scientists, developers, and many others who want to work more quickly and integrate systems more effectively.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers post-secondary students an opportunity to be paid for contributing to an open source project over a three month period.
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is an organization devoted to advancing open source technology related to the Python programming language. Since 2005, the Python Software Foundation has participated in Google Summer of Code, serving as an "umbrella organization" to a variety of Python-related projects, as well as sponsoring projects related to the development of the Python language. Python provides mentors, Google provides the program (and the money!), and students write code!
GSoC 2020 is now complete! Go here for the latest Python GSOC information.
There's hundreds of thousands of projects that use Python, and you need to narrow down the list before you can get help or do much that's useful. See How do I choose a project or sub-org? for ideas on how to do that.
Any open source experience will help you prepare for GSoC, so don't worry too much about what project you try first and don't be afraid to change your mind! When we know which sub-orgs will be participating, they'll be listed with the project ideas.
Document what you do so you can remember it later, and so you can help others if they get stuck! And if you get stuck, don't be afraid to ask for help.
Join the mailing list, IRC channel, or any other communication channels the developers use. Listen, get to know the people involved, and ask questions.
Many projects have these tagged as "easy" "bite-size" or "beginner-friendly" -- do a search to see what comes up. Competition for the easiest ones can be fierce, so don't be afraid to try something harder if you think you might know what to do.
Can't find a bug? Other ideas: find typos and fix them. Improve test coverage by writing new tests. Improve documentation. Use a tool like Pylint or Bandit to see if you can find new issues.
Hopefully you won't encounter too many, but it's always a good idea to get familiar with your project's bug reporting process.
As a beginner in your project, you're going to see things that are confusing that more experienced developers may not notice. Take advantage of your beginner mindset and make sure to document anything you think is missing!
Most projects are looking for not just coders, but good community members who people like to work with. Show your community skills by helping others and make a great impression come selection time!
Short application checklist:
Communication is probably the most important part of the application process. Talk to the mentors and other developers, listen when they give you advice, and demonstrate that you've understood by incorporating their feedback into what you're proposing. We reject a lot of students who haven't listened to mentor feedback. If your mentors tell you that a project idea won't work for them, you're probably not going to get accepted unless you change it.
The final deadline for sub-orgs is Feb 29, 2020. Please email the admins to get the signup link.
[No ideas available at this time.]
The CVE Binary Tool is a security tool that scans for a number of common, vulnerable open source components (openssl, libpng, libxml2, expat and a few others) to let you know if your system includes common libraries with known vulnerabilities.
EOS is the first open source and customizable Design System to help open source, SMEs, and all sizes of organizations deliver outstanding user interfaces and consistent user experience.
We also created an open source icon set EOS-icons that uses fontforget and python to compile into an iconic font that can be used in any web interface. This year, EOS-icons is the center of attention for GSoC as we aim to increase and improve the experience to our users by adding amazing new features for customization, animation, and more. Read our Ideas Page for more info.
The Mission Support System (MSS) is a software that is written by scientists in the field of atmospheric science. The purpose is to have a tool that simplifies the process for planning a scientific flight in which parameters of the atmosphere are measured. The research aircrafts typically carry a comprehensive scientific payload comprised of data aquisition instruments by different companies and research institutions. The measurement of relevant parameters, for example the chemical composition of trace gases, temperature or aerosol particle characteristics, are needed to improve the scientific understanding of the processes in the atmosphere. This is of significant importance for the understanding for example of climate change or the recovery of the ozone hole.
LiberTEM is a Python-based open source platform for high-throughput distributed processing of large-scale binary data sets such as pixelated scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) data. It can be used from Python through its API. The processing back-end uses dask.distributed by default and relies heavily on NumPy and related packages for processing and data handling. A web application based on Tornado, React, and Redux provides a GUI, in addition to using LiberTEM in combination with Jupyter notebooks.
uarray
uarray is a backend dispatch mechanism with a focus on array computing but geared
towards somewhat general use.
Projects under the uarray umbrella include unumpy, an incomplete
backend-dispatchable version of NumPy
and udiff, an automatic differentiation library built on top of unumpy and
uarray.
Tern is a container inspection tool to find licenses of the software installed in a container. It can be used to inspect any container created by Docker. It can generate reports in different formats. It can also be used as part of Dockerfile development to containerize applications.
Scrapinghub is a company focused on information retrieval and its later manipulation.
At Scrapinghub we maintain and contribute to a wide variety of open source projects, including Scrapy, Splash, ELI5, and Dateparser.
DFFML provides APIs for dataset generation and storage, and model definition using any machine learning framework, from high level down to low level use is supported. The goal of DFFML is to build a community driven library of plugins for dataset generation and model definition. So that we as developers and researchers can quickly and easily plug and play various pieces of data with various model implementations.
The Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) is a collaborative community that maintains a core set of projects used to package, share, and install Python software, and to interact with indexes of downloadable Python software such as PyPI, the Python Package Index.
Here's some more interesting organizations that use Python!
Please note that Python has a Community Code of Conduct and mentors and students working with the PSF are asked to abide by it as members of the Python community.
Sign up to the gsoc-general(at)python.org mailing list to get updates, reminders, and to discuss questions. Please join the list before you send a message!
The most common questions are answered here:
Our IRC channel is #python-gsoc on irc.freenode.net. (Don't know IRC? Learn more at irchelp.org).
To talk with people from a specific sub-org, check their ideas page listing for their mailing lists, IRC, and other contact information.
For mentors: All the gsoc admins can be reached at gsoc-admins(at)python(dot)org if you have questions about participating. (Students should email gsoc-general(at)python.org with all of their questions, unless they are of a sensitive personal nature.)
The 2020 Python Software Foundation (PSF) org admin team:
The org admins can be reached at gsoc-admins(at)python(dot)org (for mentors) Students should almost always visit Getting Started first, and email gsoc-general(at)python.org only if you get stuck.
We also have some "org admins emeritus" who may be able to help you: