Kicking off GSoC'18

Sunday. January 21, 2018 - 1 min

This year marks the 14th year of the Google Summer of Code program. With 212 organizations in the total, of which 41 are new, this edition of GSoC is going to be the biggest yet. And I am back yet again serving as a mentor for my organization: AOSSIE, short for Australian Open Source Software Innovation and Education. Quite a mouthful, right? But if you may have noticed, the abbreviation is a pun on the slang: Aussie :D

This year, I have also been promoted to an Org admin. Actually, the original Org admin would be too busy this year and so he wanted someone to volunteer to serve as a backup Org admin. Since no one came up voluntarily, he personally extended this invitation to me!

We are continuing with the projects we had last year with the additions of some new ones. And out of the new ones, the one I am most excited about is the Google Sky Maps! It was open sourced back in 2012 and since then, its development has come to a standstill. This is the department where open source projects (OSP) score the worst. “Don’t ask for ETAs!”, is the tagline of every OSP. So I assumed it was a good opportunity to bring this project under my umbrella Org. The idea is to revamp the entire app and build it from scratch possibly on a cross-platform framework. Of course, I can’t provide you with any ETAs, but I can assure you that you’d know when it’s out there.

Cheers!

Chirag Arora

SDE@Amazon