Summer of Code at Twitter

This year, we are participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program for the first time. If you’re not familiar with it, GSoC is a global program for aspiring student developers interested in learning and developing open source technology. It functions like a typical engineering internship where Google offers stipends for students to write code for various open source software projects and mentoring organizations.

it's our first time doing @gsoc and we are excited to mentor students @KL_7 @fbru02 @rubeydoo over the summer google-melange.com/gsoc/org/googl…

— Twitter Open Source (@TwitterOSS) April 23, 2012

Unlike most mentoring organizations participating in GSoC, Twitter contributes to a number of open source projects that span domains, organizations and involve a variety of programming languages. We received many applications this year for GSoC — and in the end, had to make some tough decisions. We’ve chosen three students to hack with us over the summer. Here they are:

Federico Brubacher (@fbru02)
Federico has been programming since he was 6; he’s currently finishing up his MS in Computer Science at ORT Uruguay. He will be building scalable, online machine learning algorithms on top of Storm, which powers portions of our Analytics platform. The project will be analogous to Mahout for Hadoop, except it’s focused on real-time machine learning. He will be mentored by Nathan Marz (@nathanmarz), the creator of Storm.

Kirill Lashuk (@KL_7)
Kirill is studying Math and Computer Science at the Belarusian State University in Minsk. Beyond that, he’s currently learning how to snowboard. He likes to go swimming and hack on open source projects. This summer, he will be adding more localization capabilities to TwitterCLDR. He will be mentored by one of our internationalization engineers, Cameron Dutro (@camertron)

Ruben Oanta (@rubeydoo)
Ruben is currently finishing his MS in Computer Science at DePaul University and in his spare time enjoys cycling and ultimate frisbee. He’ll be working on adding MySQL support to Finagle, a protocol-agnostic library that abstracts the complicated details of asynchronous RPC communication, and is used widely within Twitter. He will be mentored by Marius Eriksen (@marius) with an additional special guest mentor from Tumblr, Blake Matheny (@bmatheny).

We are excited about working with these three students over the summer, and will report back on their progress at the end of the program.

— Chris Aniszczyk, Manager of Open Source (@cra)