Community:SummerOfCode18:Brainstorming
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Mozilla community members - submit proposals here for 2018 Google Summer of Code projects with Mozilla. (If this page looks empty, it's because accepted ideas have already been transferred to the official list.) Our application for summer of 2018 goes into Google on January 23rd, so get those project ideas in quickly.
Are you a student looking to apply to SoC with Mozilla? Your first stop should be the official list of ideas. This page is full of weird ideas, some of which are still on here for a reason - it could be that they are not properly defined, the wrong size, or don't have a mentor. That makes them less likely to get accepted. You can, of course, also submit your own ideas - you don't have to put an idea on this page and get it 'made official' in order to send in a proposal for it.
How To Write A Good Project Proposal
Before adding an proposal to this list, please consider the following:
- Be specific. It's hard to understand the impact of, or the size of, vague proposals.
- Consider size. The student has eight weeks to design, code, test and document the proposal. It needs to fill, but not overfill, that time.
- Do your research. Support the idea with well-researched links.
- Don't morph other people's ideas. If you have a related idea, place it next to the existing one, or add a comment.
- Insert only your own name into the Mentor column, and then only if you are willing to take on the responsibility. If you think the SoC admins won't know who you are, leave contact details.
- Check back regularly. The administrators may have questions about your idea that you will need to answer.
- Know when to give up. If you've added the same idea for the last three years and it hasn't made it to the official page, perhaps you can predict what will happen this time.
Suggestion List
Here are the ideas lists from previous years.
Proposals can be in almost any part of the Mozilla project - don't be fooled by the "Code" in "Summer of Code". If there is no category below for your part of Mozilla, add one!
Here is the template for adding project proposals. Feel free to add new proposal to existing general categories, or add new categories as appropriate.
General category or project name
| Title | Details | Skills Needed | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title of your proposal | A few sentences describing the project. | Languages or skills needed | Project submitter's info | Project mentor's info | Anything else people might need to know about this submission. |
| ReSpec | ReSpec is a JS-based tool used to write W3C Specifications (Web Standards) that is widely used by the Web Standards Community. With 5+ years of development, it's heavily depended upon by the W3C community at large (of which Mozilla is an active participant). ReSpec's code is in need of some modernization, optimizations, and bug fixes - and we could use your help! In this project, you would have the opportunity to make ReSpec's UI more accessible, making it leaner and faster using distributed processing with Web Workers, and/or adding new features to make the lives of W3C spec Editor's better. | Languages or skills needed: JavaScript, HTML, CSS. | Marcos Caceres (Mozilla) | Marcos Caceres (Mozilla) | ReSpec offers students the opportunity to work on a large code base that has extensive real world use and impact. The project offers students an extensive range of problems to tackle, from UI design, to concurrent processing (using Web Workers to do distributed text processing), dealing with accessibility and internationalization, writing and learning about unit and integration tests, security, code review, etc. - as well as exposure to the W3C and the web standards community, this project also aims at teaching students about how web standards are put together. To determine if this is a project you would like to be part of, see the list of issues you could work on. It's a great opportunity to learn about all aspects of open source software development, but with the freedom to take on small to large challenges over the Summer (depending on your skill level and level of confidence). About the mentor: Marcos Caceres is a Staff Engineer at Mozilla who has been working on Web Standards for over a decade. Marcos is the lead maintainer of ReSpec. Marcos has extensive experience mentoring developers and has previously successfully mentor a GSO student. |
| D3D11 backend for gfx-rs HAL | gfx-rs is a graphics abstraction library written in Rust and currently used for prototyping and investigation of Vulkan Portability and WebGPU by Mozilla. The Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) of gfx-rs currently supports Vulkan, D3D12, Metal, and OpenGL. We want it to be powering WebRender for Firefox Quantum and Servo, and since WebRender currently runs on D3D11 (through Angle), we need to provide a native D3D11 backend. The implementation can be based off the existing D3D11 backend of gfx-rs pre-HAL, and the main challenge is porting the code, optimizing, and testing it. | Candidates should be familiar with Rust as well as low-level graphics development. Not having D3D11-specific experience is acceptable, given the willingness to learn it and a properly setup Windows development environment. | Dzmitry Malyshau (Mozilla) | Dzmitry Malyshau (Mozilla) | gfx-rs is one of the foundational projects in Rust gamedev/graphics, with rich history and wide range of users. We have an active community that encourages learning and curiosity in how graphics works down to the hardware. This is not a Mozilla project, but it may become a key component in Firefox Quantum for the ability to run natively on different platforms, while utilizing the fine-grained control of the graphics/compute workloads exposed by the low-level APIs. |
| Servo: Prototype ways of splitting up the script crate | Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust. One specific module contains a huge amount of code that is expensive to compile all at once. This project is intended to explore ways of splitting it into separate modules to achieve better build performance without breaking the complex set of interdependencies that exist in the code. | Candidates should be familiar with Rust, in particular using it in projects made of multiple crates and relying on features like traits and associated types. | Josh Matthews (Mozilla) | Josh Matthews (Mozilla) | Full project description page |
| web-platform-tests: Improve test manifest workflow and performance | web-platform-tests is a project for writing a cross-browser test suite, which is used across all major browser engines. The list of tests is stored in a JSON manifest file which is slow to generate and which we currently check in to the Firefox repo. These things create a poor developer experience. The goal of the project is to move to a system where the manifest is downloaded on demand for Firefox developers, and then to explore ways to speed up manifest generation such as employing parallelism or moving performance hotspots to Rust. | Candidates should be confident programming in Python. | James Graham (Mozilla) | James Graham (Mozilla) | |
| WasmFiddle | WasmFiddle is a web application that facilitates learning of the WebAssembly and its usage in the browser. The goal is to create a learning tool that will allow user to quickly start a project that uses WebAssembly, learn based on examples, explore existing popular toolchains (emscripten, rust, etc), etc. The project will be similar to what jsfiddle, jsbin, or codepen proposes, but with additional elements specific to WebAssembly only, e.g. a code generation from C/C++ languages or how the code will be compiled by the browser and run in native machine code. | Languages or skills needed: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, WebAssembly. Suggested additional technologies: React, Rust, C++. | Yury Delendik (Mozilla) | Yury Delendik (Mozilla) | The project involves extending the functionality of the existing WasmFiddle/WasmExplorer projects to:
|
| Pontoon's path to first contribution | Pontoon is Mozilla's localization tool, used by hundreds of contributors to translate Firefox, mozilla.org, and many other Mozilla products. It is critical to shipping Firefox to as many users as possible, all around the world. This year, we would like to improve the experience of first-time users of Pontoon. Your task would consist of defining a "path to first contribution", and making it as smooth as possible. That mainly involves adding a tutorial to walk users through the translation interface and reworking the landing page, all of that using recent front-end technologies in a fast-evolving application. | JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, UX. Django and React are pluses | Adrian Gaudebert (Mozilla) | Adrian Gaudebert (Mozilla) | |
| AOM - accessibility API | AOM is JavaScript API designed to help the authors to make the web pages accessible, i.e. make them usable by the assisstive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnifiers and others. AOM specification is inspired by ARIA standard, an HTML 5 extension, used to add semantics to the web pages. If you are familiar with ARIA, then you can think of AOM as JavaScript ARIA. The AOM proposal (phase 1) was already implemented in Chrome under a flag, and you can help do the same in Firefox. | Languages or skills needed: C++. | Alexander Surkov (Mozilla) | Alexander Surkov (Mozilla) | This project is the opportunity to hack on the heart of Mozilla Firefox, the Gecko engine. It involves working with a large code base and solving a wide variety of problems, from the solution architecture to finding efficient ways to implement it. If you want to learn about Gecko and accessibility, that's the right place. AOM has the potential of becoming a new standard in making the web page accessible next few years. You can help to happen it sooner. |
| metricsgraphics - zooming and brushing | metricsgraphics is JavaScript library designed to help with the presentation of interactive visualization. It is used extensively both inside and outside Mozilla. This project would be about adding a set of zooming and brushing features to facilitate the exploration of large and/or noisy datasets, such as in the Perfherder or Mission Control projects. Detailed project description to come. | Languages or skills needed: JavaScript, HTML/SVG | William Lachance (Mozilla) | William Lachance (Mozilla) | |
| Improved Pulse Inspector Backend | More details here. The idea is to create a backend service that will allow browser-side applications like pulse inspector to listen to arbitrary Pulse messages. | JavaScript (server-side), AMQP, WebSockets | Dustin Mitchell (Mozilla) | Jonas Jensen (Mozilla) / Eli (Perelman Mozilla) | |
| ..your project here! |