Well, it’s madness season again.

When people who you never thought would give a damn about programming, will start acting if that has been there lifelong ambition.

Yeah, the topic in question is Google Summer of Code 2017. For the uninitiated, you can know more about it here.

The idea is simple essentially, Google in its quest to promote open source software will pay you a stipend to work in an organisation under the GSoC program.

Open to all university students, you code away your summer vacations, and if the performance is satisfactory, you receive a stipend based on your country at the end.

Now some people have a negative view of this whole…festival, with the reason being that they perceive the motivation to monetary.

I don’t want to go much into that, but from what I see, monetary motivation has been an accepted motivator throughout all disciplines and arts that exist. And several past GSoC-ers have become integral members, for the organisation they had had mentored under.

Perhaps more succinctly put, what better way is there to attract overworked always-broke college students to the world of open source?

Anyway, I think I’ll have a go at it this year. The organization that I’ll try for will most probably be Chapel, a parallel programming language whose development is lead by Cray Inc.

Why Chapel? Well, the organization has been floating around the back of my head since GSoC 2016. And I recently got a project under a professor to make a proof of concept image-encrypter in Chapel. So that’s a win-win situation for me.

But that’s not all of the reason, right? Yeap, you got it. The answer is…

POWER!!! UNLIMITED… POWER!!!

cough cough

There is a chapter in Programming Models for Parallel Computing, MIT Press which is on the Chapel language (stumbled on it from the Chapel website).

It describes in brief, the history of Chapel, the ideas and design decisions and the also the ideals behind the language (plus a convenient tutorial to the language). Going through it, I felt like I wanted to associate with this. It’s not a world-breaking motivator, but hey! It’s a motivator nonetheless. Although,I’ll see if any other organization matches my interest or not.

Here’s hoping for the best.