News

Elastic to participate in Google Summer of Code 2020

By
Philipp Krenn

Elastic is excited to join Google Summer of Code again this year. Now is your chance to join us in the program.

If you have never heard of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), here's how it works: Organizations maintaining open source projects mentor university students to work on one of their projects for the summer. Google is kind enough to organize the program and pay the students. This year Elastic is participating in GSoC with the Elastic UI framework (EUI).

What is the Elastic UI Framework, and why are we excited about this project?

EUI is at the ❤️ of all interfaces at Elastic. It started as the design system for Kibana but has grown to be used by and shaped by teams across Elastic. Recently, EUI has been adopted by projects large and small outside of Elastic and has welcomed contributions from designers and developers all over the world.

The teams that have adopted EUI move fast and are continuously releasing great features. What this means is that EUI is constantly improving and growing to support those teams. We often release updates weekly, and new features can have an immediate impact, leading to quick feedback cycles and new ideas. We take feature requests seriously and truly appreciate those that take time to help improve EUI.

We feel that the best way to keep improving EUI and supporting the growing number of teams adopting it is to

  • Stabilize our support for widely-used projects and platforms outside Elastic.
  • Continue to provide thorough, thoughtful, usable documentation.

In our attempt to solve a real need in the open source community, we want to be as helpful as possible in getting folks started the right way.

What are we offering to our students?

Every project has two mentors (our default replication value of 1), who guide you on your three-month coding journey: Define the deliverables of your project and refine them with us. Start coding on your fork, while we are providing continuous feedback. And if everything goes well we can merge your contribution for all our users so they can enjoy it while you get your well-deserved open source kudos.

You can also read the posts from our previous two students — Aaron Zhao and Sohaib Iftikhar — to get an idea of what you can expect.

We've convinced you — what should you be doing next?

All proposals must be submitted by March 31, 2020 (here's the full timeline). We have already received some good draft proposals. Join them by writing your project proposal following our instructions and submit a pull request to EUI — start by looking at the good first issue label. The pull request does not need to be merged, but we want to see that you are up to speed with the code and tools and that we can work well together.

If there are any open questions, please check the GSoC FAQ and program rules. And if anything is still unclear, we are more than happy to help you on our Discuss Forum for GSoC or our public Slack in the #kibana channel.

We are looking forward to many great applications and successful projects!