The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is one of the open source organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC 2016) program. As a sponsor of the ASF, Pivotal is keen on supporting students looking to work in the complex and growing field of big data by developing features across a number of ASF Incubating projects that power up our data products, including Apache Geode (incubating), Apache HAWQ (incubating) and Apache MADlib (incubating). For students around the world, it also offers an opportunity to pair and learn from Pivotal’s data engineers, as well as earn $5500! Deadline to apply is Friday, March 25, 2016.
Working With GSoC, The ASF And Pivotal
The details of ASF’s participation in GSoC 2016 are spelled out here, but for those of you unfamiliar with the program here’s how to think about it:
GSoC is basically a Google’s sponsored online internship program where they match students with mentors in open source communities and pay students to develop expertise for projects those communities are working on—in our case, that includes Geode, HAWQ and MADlib. In other words, students are interning not for a single company but for an open source community at large. These students will work directly with the engineers that support these projects as well, benefiting from their real world experience and knowledge of the particular project. So, students accepted into the program will get an enormous amount of experience over the course of the summer, and, if they choose a project with the ASF, will be able to add their contributions to one of the largest, most respected open source organizations in the world to their resume. But wait! It gets better: They also get paid a $5500 stipend upon successful completion of the program! That is a nice chunk of cash in US, and surely will go even farther in places like Russia, China, India or Brazil—which implies yes, you can be an international student. The key requirement is to be a student of an accredited school.
Join Pivotal And The ASF For GSoC 2016
This is the last week for students to apply for GSoC (the timer expires on Fri 3/25), so interested students should act fast! With 180 open source organizations participating, and the ASF offering so many stellar opportunities, Pivotal sponsored projects have only had one or two natural applicant’s. Yet there are many more opportunities still available! In this list you will find opportunities to extend common data science algorithms, to work on integrations across big data projects like Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Redis, Cassandra, Hive, Mesos and Reactor, as well as opportunities to dig in and improve core functionality of the Pivotal sponsored Geode, HAWQ and MADlib projects. Pivotal has a wealth of open source engineers with bleeding edge big data skills that students will be able to work with to set up expectations, and help define the project support they need—helping to pave the way to success with a rewarding, educational experience. One you will get paid for handsomely. It really is an incredible, meaningful opportunity for students to get involved in the global software development and open source communities, as well as make some decent money for heading back to school.
To get involved, we recommend eligible students pick the projects they like from the following list of Pivotal related project ideas and apply for GSoC. If you have any questions, please comment on the blog and we will reach out to you personally to help you along in the process. Just be sure to do it by this Friday!
Learn More:
- Read more on the GSoC on Wikipedia.
- Check out our list of Pivotal related project ideas.
- Applying is actually simple. All the steps involved are summarized over here.
- Read up on the Pivotal projects and their commercial counterparts:
- Apache Geode is the core for Pivotal GemFire. See how companies use this super fast in-memory data grid to speed up transactions, sell train tickets to millions in China and India, and more.
- Apache HAWQ is the core for Pivotal HDB. Check out how this SQL-in-Hadoop engine speeds up queries by 300% or more for companies like GE and a major sports network.
- Apache MADlib is a major library used by Pivotal’s Data Science Labs. We have tons of stories on our blog how MADlib’s algorithms power some serious innovation and insights.
About the Author
