2016 Google Summer of Code mentor organizations

It’s that time of year again! We are pleased to announce the mentor organizations accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Every year, we have many more great projects than we can accept — 2016 was no exception. After carefully reviewing 369 applications, we have chosen 180 open source projects, 24% of which are new to the program. Please see our new program website for a complete list of the accepted orgs.

Over the next two weeks, students interested in participating in GSoC can research each of the organizations. The student application period begins on Monday, March 14, 2016 at 19:00 UTC and ends on Friday, March 25, 2016 at 19:00 UTC.

Interested? Start by reviewing the Ideas List from each organization to learn about the organization and how you might contribute. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization! There are contacts listed for each organization on their Ideas List — students should contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. We also strongly encourage all interested students to reach out to and become familiar with the organization before applying.

For more information, visit our website for a full timeline of important dates and program milestones. We also highly recommend all potential students read the student manual and the FAQ’s.

Congratulations to all of our mentor organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during Google Summer of Code 2016!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

Google Code-in 2015: diving into the numbers

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up a few weeks ago with our largest contest to date: 980 students from 65 countries completed a record-breaking 4,776 tasks! Working with 14 open source organizations, students wrote code, created and edited documentation, designed UI elements and logos, conducted research, developed screencasts and videos teaching others about open source software, and helped find (and fix!) hundreds of bugs.

General statistics

• 57% of students completed three or more tasks (earning themselves a sweet Google Code-in 2015 t-shirt)
• 21% of students were female, up from 18% in 2014
• This was the first Google Code-in for 810 students (83%)

Student age

Participating schools

Students from 550 schools competed in this year’s contest. Below are the top five participating schools.

School Name	Number of student participants	Country	Website
Dunman High School	147	Singapore	http://www.dhs.sg
GSS PU College	44	India	http://gssbgm.edu.in
Colegiul National Aurel Vlaicu	31	Romania	http://www.colegiulavlaicu.ro
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	28	India	http://www.shcsjagadhri.org
Freehold High School	10	United States	http://frhsd.com/freehold

Countries

The charts below display the top ten countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

Country	Number of student participants
India	246
United States	224
Singapore	164
Romania	65
Canada	24
Taiwan	22
Poland	19
United Kingdom	18
Australia	17
Germany	13

We are pleased to have 11 new countries participating in GCI this year: Albania, Armenia, Cameroon, Costa Rica (home to one of this year’s grand prize winners!), Cyprus, Georgia, Guatemala, Laos, Luxembourg, Qatar and Uganda.

In June we will welcome all 28 grand prize winners (along with a mentor from each participating organization) for a fun-filled trip to the Bay Area. The trip will include meeting with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, a tour of the Google campus and a day of sightseeing around San Francisco.  

Stay tuned to our blog for more stats on Google Code-in, including wrap up posts from the mentor organizations. We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more passionate teens to the world of open source software development.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

EarlGrey: iOS functional UI testing framework

Brewing for quite some time, we are excited to announce EarlGrey, a functional UI testing framework for iOS. Several Google apps like YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate, Google Play Music and many more have successfully adopted the framework for their functional testing needs.

The key features offered by EarlGrey include:

• Powerful built-in synchronization : Tests will automatically wait for events such as animations, network requests, etc. before interacting with the UI. This will result in tests that are easier to write (no sleeps or waits) and simple to maintain (straight up procedural description of test steps).
• Visibility checking : All interactions occur on elements that users can see. For example, attempting to tap a button that is behind an image will lead to test failure immediately.
• Flexible design : The components that determine element selection, interaction, assertion and synchronization have been designed to be extensible.

Are you in need for a cup of refreshing EarlGrey? EarlGrey has been open sourced under the Apache license. Check out the getting started guide and add EarlGrey to your project using CocoaPods or manually add it to your Xcode project file.

By Siddartha Janga, on behalf of Google iOS Developers