Wellington firm helps Google summer programme

Wellington web developer SilverStripe has become the first New Zealand company to be entrusted with the supervision of students working on Google’s “Summer of Code” programme.

SilverStripe will be mentoring ten of the 900 students worldwide chosen for the programme, which subsidises ICT students to gain work experience during the northern-hemisphere summer on real development tasks. SilverStripe has been awarded US$50,000 (NZ$67,000) by Google for the task.

The students are from Austria, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Sri Lanka and the US. They will work on SilverStripe projects from their home countries (so will not be required to experience a “winter of code” in New Zealand).

Summer of Code projects are aimed at challenging students while producing or enhancing software products that will make websites easier to build and maintain. Projects for the SilverStripe-hosted coders include making SilverStripe websites rank more highly in Google searches and integrating popular web applications such as Flickr with SilverStripe. The projects will become part of the standard free distribution of SilverStripe open source software. SilverStripe is the primary developer of the SilverStripe content management framework, written in PHP and MySQL. It is freely downloadable, and is used by many New Zealand businesses and government agencies in running their websites.