This is a lightly edited response to a question we got on IRC about how to best apply to participate in Google’s “Summer Of Code” program. this isn’t company policy, but I’ve been the one turning the crank on our GSOC application process for the last while, so maybe it counts as helpful guidance.

We’re going to apply as an organization to participate in GSOC 2019, but that process hasn’t started yet. This year it kicked off in the first week of January, and I expect about the same in 2019.

You’re welcome to apply to multiple positions, but I strongly recommend that each application be a focused effort; if you send the same generic application to all of them it’s likely they’ll all be disregarded. I recognize that this seems unfair, but we get a tidal wave of redundant applications for any position we open, so we have to filter them aggressively.

Successful GSOC applicants generally come in two varieties – people who put forward a strong application to work on projects that we’ve proposed, and people that have put together their own GSOC proposal in collaboration with one or more of our engineers.

The latter group are relatively rare, comparatively – they generally are people we’ve worked through some bugs and had some useful conversations with, who’ve done the work of identifying the “good GSOC project” bugs and worked out with the responsible engineers if they’d be open to collaboration, what a good proposal would look like, etc.

None of those bugs or conversations are guarantees of anything, perhaps obviously – some engineers just don’t have time to mentor a GSOC student, some of the things you’re interested in doing won’t make good GSOC projects, and so forth.

One of the things I hope to do this year is get better at clarifying what a good GSOC project proposal looks like, but broadly speaking they are:

Nice-to-have features, but non-blocking and non-critical-path. A struggling GSOC student can’t put a larger project at risk.

Few (good) or no (better) dependencies, on external factors, whether they’re code, social context or other people’s work. A good GSOC project is well-contained.

Clearly defined yes-or-no deliverables, both overall and as milestones throughout the summer. We need GSOC participants to be able to show progress consistently.

Finally, broad alignment with Mozilla’s mission and goals, even if it’s in a supporting role. We’d like to be able to draw a straight line between the project you’re proposing and Mozilla being incrementally more effective or more successful. It doesn’t have to move any particular needle a lot, but it has to move the needle a bit, and it has to be a needle we care about moving.

It’s likely that your initial reaction to this “that is a lot, how do I find all this out, what do I do here, what the hell”, and that’s a reasonable reaction.

The reason that this group of applicants is comparatively rare is that people who choose to go that path have mostly been hanging around the project for a bit, soaking up the culture, priorities and so on, and have figured out how to navigate from “this is my thing that I’m interested in and want to do” to “this is my explanation of how my thing fits into Mozilla, both from product engineering and an organizational mission perspective, and this is who I should be making that pitch to”.

This is not to say that it’s impossible, just that there’s no formula for it. Curiosity and patience are your most important tools, if you’d like to go down that road, but if you do we’d definitely like to hear from you. There’s no better time to get started than now.