We’re pleased to announce that the Julia Language is taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code. This means that interested students will have the opportunity to spend their summers getting paid to write code on a project of their choice.
Student applications are open from March 14th – 25th on the SoC website, but there’s no reason not to get going right away! To get you started thinking about what you’d like to work on, there are a bunch of interesting projects on our projects page. At this stage, it’s also a good idea to start getting involved with the community around your area of interest by opening issues, sending PRs and speaking to developers on relevant packages. Finding a good mentor for your project will be a big help for most applications, and showing mentors your enthusiasm is a great way to get them on board. Once you’re ready to start writing an application, check out our guidelines which gives some hints on what to include.
To give an idea of the kind of projects we'd like to support:
Parallel and distributed computing
Support for data science and analysis
Compiler optimisations and work on Julia on Android
Numerical and scientific computing – ODEs, matrix library functions, optimisation…
IDEs, tooling and 2D/3D visualisation
GPUs for graphics and numerical computing
Web tooling and networking
… and much more.
We welcome involvement in our summer frivolities even if you’re not a student. Firstly, if you happen to know any students, please let them know! We’d also like to encourage people to step up as mentors, so if you’re interested then please contact us (see below) and let us know what areas you’d like to help with. Please also feel free to give technical feedback on proposals that come up on our mailing lists.
The primary point of contact for the community is our mailing list, julia-users@googlegroups.com. For more administrative questions you can also reach out to us privately at juliasoc@googlegroups.com. Feel free to start discussions about projects and ideas, although note that it’s easier for us to answer broad questions about the process than to give specific technical feedback.
Our participation in previous years has resulted in some great projects, so we’re really looking forward to working with you this year and seeing what you can do. Good luck!