BRL-CAD and the 2012 Google Summer of Code

The BRL-CAD open source community is once again delighted to be participating as a mentoring organization in the 2012 Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! We will be helping students develop their project proposals through the April 6th application deadline. Any students interested in joining the BRL-CAD development team this summer can get started here:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/brlcad

Now in it's sixth year and BRL-CAD's fourth year participating, GSoC is an annual summer program sponsored by Google where they pay students a stipend of 5000 USD to work on open source. It's a highly competitive program both for students and for the mentoring organizations. As chances of having a BRL-CAD proposal accepted are much higher from impassioned and interactive individuals, applicants should join our developer mailing list or IRC channel and introduce themselves today! We eagerly look forward to working with new developers on their projects as we share details on their progress throughout the year.

This year, we've made it really easy for new developers to get started with BRL-CAD. As a large codebase with more than a million lines of code, figuring out where to begin can be daunting or intimidating. Developer Tom Browder has prepared an awesome virtual machine disk image with everything preconfigured, installed, and ready to go. It includes a source checkout, documentation, code examples, and more to help new developers get started quickly:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/brlcad/files/BRL-CAD%20for%20Virtual%20Machines/

One of the primary goals of the program is to introduce students to free open source software development with the specific intent of attracting those students as new long-term developers for that project. For BRL-CAD, this is the primary reason for participating. With increased awareness, new developers, and increased developer activity, we hope to accelerate BRL-CAD development to benefit the entire open source CAD community.

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http://brlcad.org/d/node/97
http://code.google.com/soc/