University Students! Earn money while coding on cool Free and Open Source projects!

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

If you are a university computer science or computer engineering student and you are looking for a way to make some extra money while getting some great work experience, read on!

Google's Summer of Code (or SoC for short) is a program that aligns university student programmers with a Free and Open Source project and a mentor and allows the student to work on a real project and earn “real money” (5500 US dollars) while getting advice from a real mentor. This work, most people agree, is better than having a student working the same hours and flipping hamburgers to make money, and many of these projects would look very good on a graduating student's resume.

Linaro is an association of companies that make or use ARM chips or boards and work together to make GNU/Linux work well on them. They also collaborate on the tool chains to develop ARM-based code for GNU/Linux and testing platforms. David Rusling, who wrote the Milo boot loader for Alpha GNU/Linux is the force behind Linaro, the CTO and (I am glad to say) one of my good friends.

Linaro has a series of SoC projects that they have listed but because Linaro received only a few students applying for their projects, they asked me to reach out to university students interested in Free and Open Source Software to see if Linaro could get some more candidates.

The range of projects run from the “intermediate skills” of porting existing GNU/Linux ARM 32 bit code to the ARM-64 bit architecture (knowledge of ARM machine and assembly language as well as knowledge of a building tool chain needed) to “advanced skills” of working inside the Linux kernel, but I would recommend students looking at the descriptions of the projects just to see the types of things that Linaro engineers work on, such as their automated testing platform, LAVA and their work on UEFI and SIMD support.

Of course there are other projects from other companies and organizations that are listed under the Google Summer of Code, and students might find other projects of interest, as well as details about the program.

Hurry, as the sign-up period is ending in the next few days!

Carpe Diem!