Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi students have been selected for the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Initiative, a global program focused on encouraging student developers in open source software development. Over 13,000 students from 108 countries take part in GSOC, which was established in 2005. It has produced over 33,000,000 lines of code for 608 open source organizations.
A total of 11 students were selected, elevating IIT Mandi to the 10th position globally in the list of number of selections per college.
"If normalized by the size of student body in each institution, IIT Mandi will rank much higher than 10th. IIT Mandi had two selections in 2016, four in 2017 and now, 11 in 2018. This is a huge jump and success for the Institute," said a statement from the institute.
"I feel proud in saying that it is wonderful to see our students sitting in the lap of nature at the remote location of IIT Mandi, away from the fast-paced life of big cities, still competing so well at a forum like GSOC. I cannot see anything but the bright future of our students, getting laurels to the institute, in the years to come," Dr. Arti Kashyap, Associate Professor, School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi and Faculty Advisor of Programming Club, said while speaking about the importance of this achievement.
As part of GSOC, students work with an Open Source organization on a three-month programming project between May and August. Students are paired with a mentor from the participating organizations, gaining exposure to Real-World Software development and techniques earning a stipend while working in areas of their interests.
This coding period, during which students write the code, involves two mid-evaluations by mentors on the progress achieved by students. Passing each evaluation leads to payment of a part of the stipend of US$ 2,400.
"Participating in GSoC has a huge improvement in coding and communication skills as well as working in large professional teams. It feels great to know that my piece of code is running on lakhs of computers and is being useful to so many people," said Abhigyan Khaund, a participant from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Mandi.
The selection procedure for the Google Summer of Code program entails students submitting proposals to one or two participating organizations describing the details of the project that they wish to do for that organization in the summer period (mid-May to mid-August) and past experiences. On the basis of these proposal organizations select the most promising applications. In contributing to open source organizations, communication is the key and mentors are a core part of the program. Mentors guide students in the right direction.
The 11 Students from IIT Mandi who got selected along with their organization are all from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Mandi:
Sahil Arora, fourth year - Coding at the Linux Foundation
Abhijeet Sharma, third year-Coding at KDE
Akash Sharma, third year- Coding at the Linux Foundation
Aksh Gautam, third year- Coding at the Mifos Foundation
Sagar Gupta, third year-Coding at Mozilla Firefox
Sahil Yadav, third year-Coding at Octave
Swapnil Sharma, third year-Coding at Open Astronomy
Abhigyan Khaund, second year-Coding at Zulip
Chirag Vashisht, second year-Coding at AOSSIE
Lakshay Arora, second year-Coding at PHPMYADMIN
Priyanshu Khandelwal, second year-Coding at FOSSASIA
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