A couple of New Zealand based businesses are in on the wider opportunity for New Zealand-basedtrainee coders to gain invaluable experience (and pay) through Google’s Summer of Code.
University students in New Zealand will have a unique opportunity to be paid to work and createnew features for some of the best known and most used software on the planet.
SilverStripe
a Wellington-based, global provider offreeium based website building and content management systems based on open source software, and
Under the deal, developers who must be enrolled as a university student have until April 6 toapply for the mentoring roles after submitting proposals to 180 pieces of software thatorganisations/mentors would like some work on. (Developers and others can find out more
If selected, and the developer doesn’t necessarily have to be in the same country as where theorganisation esides, students will receive a US$5000 stipend for the almost three month exercise.US$500 goes to the individual mentoring and providing real-world software-development exposure tostudents.
Students must execute to milestones laid out in their accepted project proposal, with one ofGoogle’s goals being to “get more open source code created and released for the benefit ofall.”
Oh, there will be more open source project identified and new developers ‘created’ as aresult too.
Silverstripe’s Sigurd Magnusson says it is an excellent opportunity to have talented peopleworking on his open source project that it currently couldn’t carry out. Some of Silverstripe’ssoftware has been modified and improved by people all around the world, but having a few extrapeople dedicated to working on a specific project will be of great benefit to all saysMagnusson.
Some of the 180 projects see
in Africa,often working on older computers, see
Other projects include some of the celebrities of the open source world, among them Apache,Debian, Git (the linux) Kernel, Mozilla (Firefox) phpMyAdmin, postgreSQL, and the software behindWikipedia.
Silverstripe was also involved in Google’s SoC in 2007, and reselection again this year is anice acknowledgement of their software in the global industry says Magnusson.
Magnusson was understated about SilverStripe’s strong performance in the international market,but being invited back after a previous SoC in 2007 will never be considered a bad thing.