Google Summer of Code, February-May 2020

In February 2020 I’ve noticed an email that Wikimedia is participating in Google Summer of Code 2020. Unfortunately, I’ve ignored the email and soon forgot about it.

In March I’ve realized that I have a couple of projects that would be good internship projects (T247844, T247835). I’ve managed to apply as a mentor in the last responsible moment. I’ve also managed to recruit a couple of mentors, Pita and John.

I’ve expected we’ll get maybe one student application. I really didn’t expect more than that. We got six applications. One student was completely unresponsive, but five were very active. I was overwhelmed with the tasks and commits they have created, and questions they have asked. March and April were very busy.

In May the accepted students were announced. We will be mentoring Vidhi and Soham from June to August. We’ve spend May preparing for the internship. Both of them are already working on their projects. I’ve created a status page to have a quick overview of the projects.

Both of them already wrote about the internship. Vidhi wrote GSoCpedia: Chapter One and Soham wrote Road to Ninja ⚔️ and Virtues of a Programmer.

I’m really looking forward to the internship. I hope I will be a good mentor to the students. I hope I will be a good co-mentor to other mentors. I hope the students will learn many skills that will be useful for them in life. How to create small commits, how to write good commit messages, the importance of local development environments, how to write code so it’s easy to review…