As you may have heard, this year there aren’t any Ruby projects as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. The Ruby community’s response to this is a pretty amazing validation of the awesomeness of us! We have created our own Ruby Summer of Code, and raised $100K in just 3 days to sponsor 20 students to work on Ruby open source projects. That’s actually a lot more than Google would have sponsored anyway. And Pivotal Labs is one of the six full-project sponsors, woot! We’re sponsoring $5K, the amount to cover one student’s work full time for the whole summer.

We will no doubt have some pivots volunteering for mentor spots. If you want to volunteer to mentor, you need to apply by the end of this week (April 3rd).

Pivotal Labs is also going to be providing desk space for (a couple?) local students who want to come work in the office for the summer – they’ll get to come to our daily standups, eat breakfast with us, attend our tech talks, play Pivot Pong, and just be part of the Pivotal experience. We hope there are some local students who participate in RSoC and that someone comes to hang out with us for the summer. It’s also likely that some local students would get to do a report on their projects at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in September.

Students can apply for spots during the period April 5th-23rd.

Thanks to everyone for stepping up and supporting this great response. This is the kind of thing that makes being a Ruby developer so gratifying, and so fun too.