Why do you folks do that?

We know this is not a spectacularly new idea. In fact, we already came up with this in 2015 and we’re told some unheard of company has been ripping off our idea for the past few years and calling it GSoC.

No, but seriously, we realized we’d been a little late announcing this in 2015 and – even though a lot of people agreed it was a pretty neat idea – it wasn’t the huge success we’d have wished it to be. This was probably due to the fact that most people had already come up with other plans (summer-jobs, internships, heck, vacation!) by the time we had made up our minds and published the post.

All new and shiny in 2016?!

No really though. In fact, the idea and the concept stay the very same. tentwentyfour¹⁰²⁴ has been strongly relying on the mighty power of Free Software for yet another year and – although we’ve continued to support some of the projects with bugfixes, new features or documentation, and kept releasing some of our in-house developments to the FLOSS community – we feel that there’s so much more that we could do – if only we could find the time – sigh.

In fact, if you’d like to know more about which Free Software projects we’re using in our day to day work and why we’ve decided to sponsor a Free-Software summer-job, I recommend you read last year’s blog post.

There are two new items on the agenda for this year though:

• We’re throwing in a free, 4-day pass for the HaxoGreen hacker summer-camp. Just pack your tent and notebook, we’ve got you covered with the ticket!
• In case we receive comparable applications from both male and female students, yes, we will favour female candidates, simply because we’d like to see more girls in tech and we consider it important to restore the gender balance in IT.

We’ve also been thinking about accepting project sponsors, but then we’ve been doing some more thinking and finally decided that it somehow felt awkward.
Why not get in touch with us if you really, totally, abso – diddeli – daddeli – lutely want to become a project sponsor and need us to reconsider.

The nitty gritty details:

So you’ve decided you like Free Software too, haven’t made any plans yet to spend two months worth of holidays on a vacation sunbathing on a beach or hiking up the Himalayas and you’d like to save up some funds for that sweet new workstation or VR headset? We’re delighted!

• Make sure you’re eligible to be sponsored.
• Learn which projects your may choose from.
• Find out how long this summer of code will be (and until when can you apply)?
• Learn what exactly it means to be sponsored

Who’s eligible? – We’re aiming at pupils and students out of Luxembourg and the greater region.
Yes, we’re specifically targeting local youth because we’d like to see this region become more active in software development and ICT in general – and we also don’t necessarily agree that sponsoring Microsoft Surface™ tablets or Office 365 is the way to go … cough cough.
Also, it would allow that person to either join us at – or at least physically drop by – our office from time to time, to discuss the project they’d be working on or simply to share a cold, caffeinated beverage.

What can I do? – Although we do have some fair ideas of what we’d like our student to work on, we’re still open to suggestions. If you have a great Free Software project that you’d like to push and that would ideally also be of some use to us, please do suggest it! Also, depending on the time and your proficiency, why limit yourself to a single project? Here are some of our ideas:

• Develop an extension to Invoiceplane, the open source application used for managing quotes, invoices, clients and payments. The extension will tie Invoiceplane to the Toggl API, allowing users of both apps to import tracked time and easily turn these entries into an invoice.
• Develop an extension to Mediawiki, the open source wiki engine that drives Wikipedia. The extension will use Semantic MediaWiki properties or query PuppetDB for facts collected on Unix systems by Facter and generate Blockdiag diagrams automatically.
• Extend the BehatHtmlFormatterPlugin to be able to automatically embed screenshots created when tests fail.
• Develop a Gantt extension or a general purpose CSV importer for Phabricator.
• Create a gettext/.pot extraction utility for twig/jinja2/mustache-style templates.

The programming languages are up to you… or the software projects you will be working on.

How long? – We’re willing to sponsor one or more students for a total and maximum duration of four weeks during the months of July–September 2016. That could be one student for four weeks, or two students two weeks each, or… well, you get the general idea.

Sponsoring? – Based on local laws and customs, tentwentyfour¹⁰²⁴ suggests to apply the remuneration applicable during a Fixed-term employment contract for pupils/students. Which means a salary adapted to your age, minimum, with an increase to the hourly rate based on your skillset and experience. Additionally, should you accept to join us in our offices every now and then, we will gladly pay for public transportation and lunch, once a week.

So, interested in on working on some Free Software projects all the while getting paid to do so?
Any questions?
Hurry up and drop us a line via liam or Twitter!