In 2013, CERN/SFT is participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the third time, following previous years' great experiences.

The group submitted proposals for a variety of projects, covering a wide range of their activities. More specifically, student developers had the opportunity to sharpen their programming skills by developing ideas and contributing code for the ROOT package, Geant4 and  CERN Virtual Machine amongst others.

John Apostolakis and Jakob Blomer (PH/SFT), are the organizers of the SFT group in GSoC, and act as administrators for the CERN-SFT participation and liaisons to the Google organizers of GSoC. They collected the ideas for potential projects from different group members, who were willing to mentor the students. Each project concerned developing a feature for open source software that the group is working on.

CERN-SFT was awarded eight students slots for the second year in a row. Six of the projects concern software developed in SFT. These spanned improvements to the Cling interpreter and an improved formula class in Root, refinement of configuration mechanism for the CERN  Virtual Machine, and a focused performance monitoring for a region of code. Two projects are related to different groups, a union filesystem in LHCb and the extension of mathematical editing for the Indico project in IT. The list of the projects and their description can be found at: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2013

The students applied to GSoC, preparing a proposal of the work and discussing with their potential mentors. The students were selected in May, and started to work in mid-June. Mentors and students communicate constantly via email, instant messaging and Skype. Regular discussions enable mentors to follow and assist students with any questions or difficulties.

The mid-term evaluation of the projects took place in early August. The students will continue to contribute and communicate with their supervisors through to the completion date of the projects onSeptember 16, the 'pencils down' day.

After this date, students will have a week to scrub code, write further tests and improve the documentation. On September 27 the supervisors in collaboration with the students will begin to submit the final results of their work and on October 1 Google the final project-outcomes will be presented.