Young Coders Summer on Google By Joanna Glasner Wired News
02:00 AM Jul, 28, 2006 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71483-0.html?tw=wn_index_5 PORTLAND, Oregon -- When Narayan Newton, an Oregon State computer science student, received an e-mail from a prominent developer of Linux desktop applications, he expected it to be a complaint. "I'd submitted some bug reports," he says. Instead, Newton was surprised to learn that the programmer, Duncan Mac-Vicar, would be his personal mentor for three months, courtesy of Google's "Summer of Code" program. The program, now in its second summer, pays 630 students to stay home and code over the summer, working under mentors that include more than a few rock stars of the open-source world. Conceived in 2005 as a way to get around one of the open-source movement's chief recruitment hurdles -- namely that skilled volunteer coders also need paying jobs -- the program this year includes programmers from some 90 countries working on such tasks as building an open-source instant messaging app compatible with China's leading message program, and improving Mozilla's integration with the Linux desk. It's not for the screen-glare averse. "A lot of times in computer science school you're exposed to important problems, but you're not exposed to what's on the other side of the keyboard," said Chris DiBona, Google's open-source program manager, discussing the program at this week's O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Some students admitted experiencing trepidation when contributing to mailing lists where their work would be viewed by big names in open source or even inventors of programming languages. More than 6,000 people applied for the 630 spots in the program. Of those accepted, many are not on track to finish, according to student mentors from companies and research institutions overseeing this year's projects. A common complaint centered on students leaving everything for the last minute. As in any job that requires self-motivation, not everyone's capable of being their own taskmaster. Michael Sparks, a mentor and research engineer at BBC, said he expects at least one of the four students he's mentoring will not complete the program. But another surprised Sparks by producing high-quality code while developing a three-dimensional user interface. DiBona said he was disappointed that applications weren't more geographically dispersed. Students in North America and Western Europe generated the lion's share of projects, although the few in India and Eastern Europe were reportedly most pleased with the $4,500 stipend the program provides. The Google program is one of a few initiatives to attract aspiring programmers to open source, including a reward program that offers bounties to Ubuntu programmers who submit fixes. Google is also hoping to attract a user base of open-source programmers to a new SourceForge-like project-hosting site announced here Thursday. ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 antunes at uh dot edu Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
