I took part in GSoC in 2007, it change my whole life. Coming from Eastern Europe and with very little English it exposed me to experienced engineers from Silicon Valley that I would never think to contact. That lead to an internship at NASA a year after, and those references lead to a Ph.D. from Ivy League and a career in AI. That short acceptance letter turned to my life upside down and I can't be more grateful that Google is still doing it for another generation of engineers.
Snap! 2007 was my year too, and yes, it really sparked everything for me.
Very new to the community, my accepted GSoC project was adding some features to an XMPP library. I discovered recently that this library is in use by the Zoom desktop client.
Now, 15 years later, I'm the Executive Director of the XMPP Standards Foundation and our organization is still participating in Google Summer of Code. It's great to have new people in the community, especially the ones for who GSoC is that same spark it was for me and many others, and the ones who stick around long after GSoC ends.
GSoC 2007 was also the year they gave us Karl Fogel's Producing Open-source Software book (he managed to sign every copy!). This amazing instruction manual, combined with the GSoC experience, gave me the confidence to launch my own open-source projects (such as the XMPP server software that powers things such as Jitsi Meet).
I'm really glad that the GSoC programme continues, and hope it will deliver the same kind of impact for new generations of developers and open-source projects.
