Ruby Summer of Code 2010

Fellow Rubyists, I'm proud to announce the first annual Ruby Summer of Code.

In the best tradition of Google's legendary summers of code, Ruby Central, Engine Yard [1], and the Rails team [2] have joined forces to muster a legend of our own, a new summer program for student Rubyists to flex their open source might.

* Students are paid a $5000 stipend to work full-time during their summer break. * A group of Ruby gurus volunteer their time as mentors. * Mentors vote on student proposals based on usefulness, benefit to the Ruby community, and history of motivated open source contribution.

Check out http://rubysoc.org for the full story, to volunteer as a mentor, and to sponsor a student.

Student applications begin on April 4. Students, start working on your proposal now! Rails [3] and JRuby [4] have ideas lists up as a starting point. All Ruby projects are welcome.

This is an entirely volunteer effort. The more we raise, the more students we can sponsor. 100% of contributions go directly to students. We already broke the $20,000 mark -- 4 summer students -- and we're aiming for *20* total.

Do you make a living using Ruby? Does your business live and breathe Rails? It's a sweet and wonderful path. Donate today at http://rubysoc.org.

Let's make this happen.

Best, Jeremy Kemper

[1] http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/ruby-summer-of-code-is-here/ [2] Ruby on Rails — Ruby Summer of Code [3] http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rubysoc/2010/ideas [4] http://wiki.jruby.org/RubySummerOfCode2010

Hello again,

Fellow Rubyists, I'm proud to announce the first annual Ruby Summer of Code.

In the best tradition of Google's legendary summers of code, Ruby Central, Engine Yard [1], and the Rails team [2] have joined forces to muster a legend of our own, a new summer program for student Rubyists to flex their open source might.

* Students are paid a $5000 stipend to work full-time during their summer break. * A group of Ruby gurus volunteer their time as mentors. * Mentors vote on student proposals based on usefulness, benefit to the Ruby community, and history of motivated open source contribution.

Check out http://rubysoc.org for the full story, to volunteer as a mentor, and to sponsor a student.

Student applications begin on April 4. Students, start working on your proposal now! Rails [3] and JRuby [4] have ideas lists up as a starting point. All Ruby projects are welcome.

This is an entirely volunteer effort. The more we raise, the more students we can sponsor. 100% of contributions go directly to students. We already broke the $20,000 mark -- 4 summer students -- and we're aiming for *20* total.

Do you make a living using Ruby? Does your business live and breathe Rails? It's a sweet and wonderful path. Donate today at http://rubysoc.org.

Let's make this happen.

Best, Jeremy Kemper

[1] http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/ruby-summer-of-code-is-here/ [2] Ruby on Rails — Ruby Summer of Code [3] http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rubysoc/2010/ideas [4] http://wiki.jruby.org/RubySummerOfCode2010

UPDATE

Great news: we broke the $75,000 mark in less than 24 hours! We've raised enough to fully fund 15 summer students.

We're so grateful to see the Ruby community coming out to support this program in its first go around. Great expectations.

So with stars in our eyes and we're setting a cap at 20 students. Just $25K to go. Take us the last mile.

Best, Jeremy Kemper

Back again --

Ruby Summer of Code is open to all students worldwide, minus those in the handful of countries prohibited by U.S. law (e.g. Cuba, Iran, Syria, ...)

Last year, Rails had only 1 U.S. citizen among our 4 students participating in Google Summer of Code.

jeremy

Hi jbw,

Jeremy Kemper wrote:

Fellow Rubyists, I'm proud to announce the first annual Ruby Summer of Code.

In the best tradition of Google's legendary summers of code, Ruby Central, Engine Yard [1], and the Rails team [2] have joined forces to muster a legend of our own, a new summer program for student Rubyists to flex their open source might.

* Students are paid a $5000 stipend to work full-time during their summer break.

One suggestion for future years might be to allow non-students. Since 1) we're not google SoC so we can, and 2) if somebody can do it full time then why not...

I think the goal of getting younger developers involved in open source is important and allowing non-students might make it harder for younger developers, that's with the assumption all young people are students :stuck_out_tongue:

College-student status is a measure that has worked well for Google so we're cargo-culting and running with it this year. Primarily, it filters out professional developers who would treat the program as a three-month contract gig and gain nothing from it but a paycheck.

But, there are many paths to discovering the joys of Ruby and open source participation. We're not huge fans of adding age and schooling discrimination on top of that.

So perhaps we treat it like the Olympics: amateurs only.

Next year, I hope to see plumbers switching careers and retirees unlearning COBOL, too!

jeremy