This summer I had the awesome opportunity to be a mentor for ROSEdu Summer of Code. The program is a spoof of the more widely known Google Summer of Code, but it essentially does the same thing. It gives young students the opportunity to work on an open source project for the summer, while getting paid to do it, and with a mentor to guide them through the process.

My trainees for the summer were +Robert Bîndar and +Catalin Iordache, both students at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. Robert just finished his first year and Catalin his second. They both worked on Mozilla Firefox at developing the Networking Dashboard, a diagnostics tool for networking related issues. It is currently available on the Nightly and Aurora channels, by typing about:networking in the URL bar.

Things worked out really well. They ended up fixing several bugs and greatly improved the networking dashboard. An overview of their activity over the summer can be seen here and here.
 While not all of their patches have been merged in mozilla-central yet, their coding work has just begun. One thing I can say for sure is that Mozilla Firefox has just won two capable and passionate developers.



If you want more specifics about their work until now, you can visit the RSoC blog: http://rsoc.rosedu.org/blog/