Rails Girls Summer of Code + Servo

Servo is taking part in the Rails Girls Summer of Code program as a mentoring project once again. We’re really excited about the program after our wonderful experience last year!

What is Rails Girls Summer of Code?

The Rails Girls Summer of Code program (RGSoC) takes place each year between July and September. Applicants form pairs (“teams”) and apply to be matched with a mentoring open source project - if a team is selected for a project, they will contribute to that project for those three months while receiving a stipend and regular coaching in return.

How is this program different from similar Summer of Code programs?

Unlike Google Summer of Code, one of RGSoC’s explicit goals is to increase the diversity of the open source community. This means that there are some restrictions on who is eligible to participate. Additionally, RGSoC is not limited to university and college students. This provides opportunities to people who are transitioning into software development roles and could benefit from several months of focused, real-world experience to improve their skills. Finally, RGSoC makes participants pair up and collaborate with coaches to provide the best possible environment for making meaningful contributions.

What does it mean that Servo is participating?

Servo has been accepted as a mentoring project, which means that we want to work with a team to help them implement missing features, such as responsive images and the OffscreenCanvas API. We have only three requirements:

• you are comfortable using a programming language (eg. any of Python, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, C, etc.)
• you are enthusiastic about learning Rust (which will be used for all changes to Servo)
• you are unafraid of learning enough HTML/CSS/JavaScript to interact with our automated tests

If you fit that profile and are eligible to participate, then we would love to see an application with your name on it! The deadline for applying to the RGSoC program is March 8, so don’t delay!

What is it like contributing to Servo in this program?

Last year, Jeena Lee and Malisa Smith implemented the Fetch API as part of RGSoC. You can read about their experience in a wrap-up blog post that they wrote, or the transcript of a talk they gave about it; you can also read their daily logs and observe the progression of starting from no prior Rust knowledge to writing tutorials for other Servo developers by the end. If you arrive ready to learn, we are more than happy to teach you what you need to make meaningful contributions to an exciting new web browser engine!

We’re thrilled to be part of such a great program, and we can’t wait to meet you! Please get in touch if you have any questions about the program or Servo. We hope you choose to apply!