Python Summer of Code: 2019 ARCHIVE

Students: get paid to work on open source projects!

Projects: find new contributors and mentor the next generation!

What is it?

Python

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

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 2019 is now complete! Go here for the latest Python GSOC 2020 information.

Want to prepare before 2020 starts? You can get started as a new open source contributor anytime!

How do I get started?

Choose an organization.

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.

Set up your own development environment.

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.

Start communicating with the developers.

Join the mailing list, IRC channel, or any other communication channels the developers use. Listen, get to know the people involved, and ask questions.

  • Read first to see if your question has already been answered. We get a lot of repeat questions!
  • Communicate in public (not in private). Most open source work is done in the open, so demonstrate that you can do that!

Try to fix a bug.

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.

Find bugs and report them.

Hopefully you won't encounter too many, but it's always a good idea to get familiar with your project's bug reporting process.

Help with documentation.

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!

Help others.

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!

How to apply

Short application checklist:

  1. Read the links and instructions given on this site -- All of it! we've tried to give you all the information you need to be an awesome student applicant.
  2. Choose a sub-org (check the list here). Applications not associated with a sub-org typically get rejected.
  3. Talk with your prospective mentors about what they expect of student applicants and get help from them to refine your project ideas. Listening to your mentors' recommendations is very important at this stage!
  4. Prepare a patch for that sub-org. Usually we expect students to fix a bug and have made a pull request (or equivalent). Your code doesn't have to be accepted and merged, but it does have to be visible to the public and it does have to be your own work (mentor help is ok, code you didn't write is not).
  5. Write your application (with help from your mentors!) The 2019 application template is available here. All applications must go through Google's application system; we can't accept any application unless it is submitted there.
    • Use a descriptive title and include your sub-org name in Google's system. Good example: "Mailman: Improve archive search" Bad example: "My gsoc project"
    • Make it easy for your mentors to give you feedback. If you're using Google docs, enable comments and submit a "draft" (we can't see the "final" versions until applications close). If you're using a format that doesn't accept comments, make sure your email is on the document and don't forget to check for feedback!
  6. Submit your application to Google before the deadline. We actually recommend you submit a few days early in case you have internet problems or the system is down. Google does not extend this deadline, so it's best to be prepared early! You can edit your application up until the system closes.

Tip

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.

What goes in an application?

An ideal application will contain 5 things:
  1. A descriptive title including the name of the sub-org you want to work with (if this is missing, your application may be rejected!)
  2. Information about you, including contact information.
  3. Link to a code contribution you have made to your organization. (Usually this is a link to a pull request.)
  4. Information about your proposed project. This should be fairly detailed and include a timeline.
  5. Information about other commitments that might affect your ability to work during the GSoC period. (exams, classes, holidays, other jobs, weddings, etc.) We can work around a lot of things, but it helps to know in advance.

Ideas

You are viewing an archived website from 2019! For current ideas, see https://python-gsoc.org/.

MNE-Python


MNE is a free and open source software designed for processing electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. EEG and MEG data analysis requires advanced numerics, signal processing, statistics and dedicated visualization tools. MNE-Python is a pure Python package built on top of numpy, scipy, matplotlib and scikit-learn.

Website

Mailing List

Contact

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

PySAL


PySAL is a library for quantitative analysis of geographic data built on top of numpy and scipy.sparse.. The package includes methods for exploratory spatial data analysis and cluster detection, regression models with geographical data, space-time models, and visualization.

Website

Contact

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

Python Software Foundation GSoC Team


Under the Python Software Foundation (PSF) the GSoC Team has ran a GSoC umbrella organization for the Python language. This sub-org is being used to sponsor tools for the PSF GSoC team, specifically tools for managing GSoC from diverse sub-orgs for PSF. At this time, Python is NOT sponsoring any projects related to the development of the language -- but we're looking for mentors if you want to run such a project

Website

Contact
(or see alternate methods)

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

SciPy


SciPy is a library that provides fundamental routines for scientific computing: statistics, optimization, integration, linear algebra, Fourier transforms, signal processing, and more.

Website

Mailing List

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

StarKit


StarKit is a library to infer stellar parameters from astrophysical observations

Website

GSoC Website

Ideas Page

Contact

Status: Ideas ready

Nuitka


Nuitka is a Python compiler written in Python. The mission is make Python a C speed programming language with graceful degradation, i.e. simple Python is very fast, while using all the features is still faster.

This is a chance to join this extra ordinary project and make a difference to the programming world by taking Python where it currently is not.

Nuitka currently does not yet live up to the task, but with your help it will get there sooner and you will have been a part of it.

GSoC Website

Ideas Page

Twitter Contact

Idea Discussions

Status: Ideas ready

MSS - Mission Support System

Examining the atmosphere by research aircraft is a costly and highly collaborative effort involving a large community of scientists, their one-of-a-kind measurement instruments and a very limited amount of available flight-hours.
The Mission Support System enables the planning of optimal flight paths by visualising the results of model simulations in combination with the chosen flight path and allowing for a simple iterative and collaborative improvement process, enabling the best measurement flights possible.


With your help we can extend this client/server application for other approaches than only atmospheric research flights.

Website

Mailing List

Contact
(or see alternate methods)

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready.

EOS Design System

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.

Design Systems serve as a centralized source of information for UX, UI, and other brand-related guidelines that help not only developers find the UI element or component they need, but also designers to build faster prototypes while streamlining the collaboration between the two.

Website

IRC

Mailing list

Slack

Twitter

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready.

Scrapy

Scrapy is the world's best-loved scraping framework, helping people to efficiently extract and use web-data using Python.

Using Scrapy, you can travel through sites at remarkable speed, and using only a few lines of readable code, extract high-quality data for use in research, for enterprise, for archival, and more.

Scrapinghub, as lead maintainers of Scrapy and its constellation of supporting libraries, is open to mentoring motivated students who would like to work on Scrapy, or on a new Open Source library for quality-assurance in Scrapy spiders, Spidermon.

Website

IRC

Mentors

Ideas

Status: Ideas ready.

Statsmodels

Statsmodels is a general purpose statistics and econometrics package written in Python and some Cython. It is part of the scientific Python stack that is oriented towards data analysis, data science and statistics, but is also used for statistical analysis in science, engineering and other fields.

Statsmodels provides a large range of statistical methods, estimation and prediction models and hypothesis tests, among them linear, generalized linear and robust linear regression models, models for discrete data, and a large group of forecasting models in time series analysis.

Statsmodels has participated for many years in GSOC. This provided a large contribution to improving the coverage of both basic and advanced methods in statistics and econometrics.

Website

Mailing list

Ideas

Status: Ideas in progress.

Buildbot

Buildbot is an open-source framework for automating software build, test, and release processes.

Buildbot can automate all aspects of the software development cycle: Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Release Management

Buildbot is a framework in which you implement a system that matches your workflow and grows with your organization.

Buildbot has participated for many years in GSoC, and some of its core features were developed during GSoC.

Website

What it looks like

Mailing lists and contacts

Ideas

Status: Ideas ready.

CVE Binary Tool

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.

Source Code

Contact

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready.

DFFML

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.

Source Code

Contact

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready.

Mercurial


Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface.

Website

Mailing List

#mercurial on Freenode

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas page in progress

TARDIS


TARDIS is an open-source code to explore observations of supernovae (exploding stars). It has a fun and active community that consists of Astrophysicists, Computer Scientists and Statisticians

Website

Contact on Gitter

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

Python Argentina


Python Argentina Civil Association (A.C.PyAr) is a formal non-profit organization of programmers with focus on community projects, mainly oriented to Spanish-speakers & Latin Americans:
  • Educational initiatives (CDPedia: Spanish offline wikipedia, PyZombis: Spanish MOOC, Python Tutorials)
  • Community management tools (PyArWeb: local website in Spanish, asoc_members: NGO membership)
  • Libraries and applications for accountants & lawyers (legal case web app, electronic invoice libs & tools)
  • Developers tools (fades: easy virtualenv wrapper)

Website

Wiki (in Spanish)

Mailing List

secretaria (at) ac.python.org.ar via e-mail / hangouts

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas page ready

LiberTEM


LiberTEM is a Python-based open source platform for high-throughput distributed processing of pixelated scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) data and other large-scale binary data sets. A responsive web application based on React and Redux provides a GUI, it can be used in Python scripts and Jupyter notebooks through its API, it uses dask.distributed as its default processing back-end, and it relies heavily on numpy for processing and data handling.

Website

Gitter chat channel

d.weber@fz-juelich.de by e-mail

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

Panda3D


Panda3D is an open source framework for 3D rendering and games. It combines the speed of C++ with the ease of use of Python to give you a fast rate of development without sacrificing on performance.

Website

IRC

Discord

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

Plone CMS


Plone is a Python-based CMS built with workflow and security at the forefront. It is developed by a world-wide community. In the 18 years sicne its first release, Plone has evolved into a mature solution, with an emphasis on code quality and testing. But Plone is also forward-looking. In the past few years development has focused on headless technologies and cutting-edge front-end implementations.

Website

Community Forum

Gitter Chat

Ideas Page

Status: Ideas ready

Friends of the PSF

Here's some more interesting organizations that use Python!

  • OpenAstronomy - an umbrella organisation that includes open source projects used by researchers and engineers around the world to better understand the universe
  • GNU Mailman - mailing list management software

Getting in Touch

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.

Mailing Lists.

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:

IRC / Live chat

Our IRC channel is #python-gsoc on irc.freenode.net. (Don't know IRC? Learn more at irchelp.org).

Specific sub-orgs

To talk with people from a specific sub-org, check their ideas page listing for their mailing lists, IRC, and other contact information.

Tips!

  1. Read first. We've tried to answer the common questions on this site, and we get asked things like "How do I get started?" and "Where do I find easy bugs?" a lot. Check the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on the student page for more!
  2. Be Patient! Our mentors typically have day jobs and can't always answer right-away. If you can't hang out on IRC for an answer, send an email instead.
  3. Ask questions directly on IRC. You don't need to introduce yourself or say hi first, just ask away!
  4. Communicate in public. That lets many mentors read your question so you can usually get an answer faster.

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.)

Org admins

The 2019 Python Software Foundation (PSF) org admin team:

  • Terri Oda (terri on IRC) - focus areas: figurehead, making final decisions, website/documentation
  • James Lopeman (meflin on IRC) - focus areas: IRC, ideas pages reviews, saying no
  • John Hawley (warthog9 on IRC) - focus areas: infrastructure, advice, emergency mentoring/mentor supervision.
  • Matthew Lagoe (Botanic on IRC) - focus areas: student blogs, irc bot, marking sure things happen on time
  • Kushal Das (kushal on IRC) - focus areas: advice, time zone coverage

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:

  • Florian Fuchs (florianf on IRC)
  • Stephen Turnbull (yaseppochi on IRC)

Other Stuff