Google Summer of Code 2017 Begins

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Today marks the start of another Google Summer of Code, which is the 12th year that Drupal has been selected to work with a terrific group of bright and eager students. In this great program, Google pays students to work on various open source projects for 10 weeks. Our 8 students are working on some pretty cool projects with 15 community mentors. They have spent the last few weeks getting oriented in our community, and the actual coding work begins today. The deadline for their projects is August 29th. As in prior years, Drupalize.Me proudly supports these students by providing them with free memberships for the duration of the projects so they can dive right into Drupal 8.

Drupal has been involved with GSoC since its beginning in 2005. A number of long-term contributors started out with Drupal through GSoC projects. The program gives students real, paid, experience, and open source projects benefit not only through their development work, but also by the chance to grow the community. If you'd like to follow along with the students' work over the coming months, check out the Google Summer of Code group.

There is a LOT of work that goes into running GSoC. Aside from the work for the students themselves, the volunteers who manage the project have to solicit, vet, and choose the projects, find and pair up mentors, and then of course, help the students get oriented and digging into the Drupal community. The mentors also devote their time and enthusiasm to help the students get off on the right foot, provide resources, and give them development guidance as they learn. I’d like to say a HUGE thank you to Google and the Drupal community volunteers who make this amazing program possible.