GSoC

The Google “Summer of Code” program is available for students and recent graduates. Check section "7.1. Eligibility" in the Rules to see if you are eligible.

Interested students write and submit a detailed project proposal. If the proposal is accepted, you work on your project while being paid by Google. Mid-term and end-term the student and the mentor both submit evaluations to Google.

See the section at the top of the contributing page for details why Pitivi is important, if you're still not convinced.

While a GSoC with us is one of the most fun and rewarding experiences you can get, you need to consider it as professional work. We expect you to be a reliable, hard-working person. If things don't go well because for example your roommates are noisy, you don't have air conditioning, or your internet connection is unreliable, and you can't fix it, tell us so we can terminate your internship. No excuses!

Our policy is to ignore “theoretical” applications — to be eligible, you must show you're capable. Best is to get involved early-on and make one or more contributions prior to applying. We will base ourselves 90% on your involvement and demonstrated ability to contribute code to Pitivi. The more good-quality patches you’ve made, the more chances you have.

Who we are looking for

We are looking for smart and talented developers interested in multimedia and video editing.

The time is very short. To make the most out of it, you need to be highly communicative. Particularly when you are stuck on a problem or don't see any way out. We require to see you in our chat room, that's where you can meet the team, where you follow what's going on and that's where we communicate.

You must have experience with Python or C, depending on your project. Knowledge of Git, GStreamer and related technologies is a plus. Familiarity with Test-Driven Development is a plus.

What we offer

You can improve the lives of thousands of users by working on a tangible and fun project.

On the technical side, it might interest you that we use GES/GStreamer as backend, GTK for the UI, the Meson build system, and Flatpak to distribute our own builds to users. You have a fantastic learning opportunity to play with these technologies. We'll direct you to make great use of the tight-knit GStreamer and GTK communities so you have high-quality feedback throughout your project.

The dependencies for a video editor are very complex. But thanks to Flatpak we have a development environment with all the dependencies in a sandbox, which is very easy to set up. This means you won't have to mess your system to be able to build the latest GStreamer. Since all of us will be using the same dependencies, there will be no friction due to the complex dependencies.

How to apply and get started

You don't have to be a veteran hacker but it is important that you prove to us — and to yourself — that you know what you're getting into and that you can handle it. You need to demonstrate that you have sufficient technical skills, motivation, and have some familiarity with the application and its source code. This also ensures that you get to know members of the community and have sufficient time and information to properly plan your project.

Therefore, you should proceed like this:

1. Come to our chat room and stick around.
2. Setup your development environment and run the Test suite. Explore the development version of Pitivi, what works well and what doesn't, etc.
3. To get a better idea of how comfortable you are with the code and community, make some small contributions to the code. Pick some small bug to fix and have a go at it. Keep us in the loop. Ideally you start getting involved in January/February, or even earlier, to have time to try another team if we are not a good fit.
4. Find a cool feature you need in Pitivi and tell us. Start making a design doc on how you plan to implement it. Feel free to pick a project from the list of blessed GSoC project ideas.
5. Fill out the application template and apply officially to the Google's Summer of Code website.

Subpages:

GSoC Project Ideas – GSoC project ideas we like

Fill out the Application – How to fill out the application to GSoC

Past GSoCs – What the GSoC students did in the previous years