Last updated at Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:47:42 GMT

Spend the summer with Metasploit

I'm proud to announce that the Metasploit Project has been accepted as a mentor organization in the Google Summer of Code! For those unfamiliar with the program, their about page sums it up nicely:

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.

This is an amazing program that helps remove the financial barriers of contributing to Open Source. Basically how it works is you (a university student) work on an Open Source project over the summer (12 weeks) with a mentor who has experience working on that project. As long as you keep at it and hit your milestones, Google gives you money along the way based on performance. Pay your rent, stock the fridge, get coffee, whatever.

Open Source is the heart of the Metasploit community, but it's more than that to me. It's the means by which we, as programmers, can help improve the world a little bit at a time. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, building greater things because others before us have built great things. Like many OSS contributors, I personally started contributing to an Open Source project because it allowed me to get my work done more efficiently. By working together on Open Source, we can help others get their work done too, and enable them to build greater things. By working on Metasploit in particular, you will be helping to democratize offensive security, improving the world by giving everyone access to the same techniques that bad guys use, so they can be better understood and mitigated.

If Metasploit is not where your heart lies, I encourage you to consider contributing to one of the other GSoC security projects.

We have a list of project ideas that will have you writing some awesome code for great justice. Most everything requires at least a little Ruby, but if you're more comfortable in C or Python, there are options for you as well. Whatever you choose, I'm super excited to see what you will accomplish.

Important dates to know:

  • Student Application Period - March 20, 2017 - April 3, 2017
  • Student Projects Announced - May 4, 2017

If you are interested in participating, you should definitely check out the rest of the GSoC timeline. You will need to apply to us and also through GSoC's application page when it goes live next week on March 20th.

So please come work with us. Be the shoulders others can stand on.