It’s official, we will be mentoring three students during this year’s Google Summer of Code!
- Shaopeng Lin will work on fixing and updating Kiwix desktop. His proposal was outside of the projects we had initially listed, but the code he showed in his PR was very solid and that made a huge difference with others that had gone the safer path;
- Uchechukwu Orji will be working on a new Download Speed tester – a key tool when you have users all around the world and want to make sure they can all access content. Awesome proposal, awesome PRs. He was our top choice by a mile;
- Dan Niles will be revamping our Youtube UI. Dan did not just push buttons and made great PRs, but his proposal actually considered the product and how it would appear in different environments (which nobody else did). Proof to us of very mature thinking.
Join us in congratulating them, and thanks to everyone that participated! And if you are a recruiter, we will be happy to help you poach these guys off of us as they have already shown their outstanding coding skills.
For the record, there were more than 44,000 applicants this for the entire program, probably the best open-source support program that exists at the moment:
– 420 applications were submitted within 10 minutes of the final deadline!
– 44 made it to Kiwix (0.1%), 16 (0.05%) were selected for the last round, and only three candidates (<0.01%!) made it to work with us.
About 10% of our applicants had clearly been using AI, and that showed easily: poor code, no understanding of what they were doing/submitting. A very good way to separate chaff from grain, though probably not in the way most would expect.