This year the syslog-ng project will participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentor organization again. If you are a university student or otherwise eligible to participate in the GSoC program, you can choose to develop a new feature for syslog-ng.
What is GSoC?
The GSoC program was started by Google almost two decades ago, so I assume that most of you have already heard about it. However, if you’re seeing this abbreviation for the first time, here is how GSoC is defined on their website:
Google Summer of Code is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors.
Why syslog-ng?
The syslog-ng project started in 1998 and quickly became a Swiss army knife of log management. With syslog-ng, you can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to a wide variety of destinations. Syslog-ng allows you to collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure and store or route them to log analysis tools.
The syslog-ng project has been participating in GSoC since 2012, so for already a decade now. We have many successful projects behind us, and many years of experience mentoring GSoC students from all around the world. Most of the code developed by GSoC students is now part of syslog-ng and running on millions of machines around the world.
The syslog-ng project is also interesting from the coding point of view. The core of the software is developed in good old, high performance C, however, C is not the only language available: most of syslog-ng can also be extended in Python.
How to get started?
The GSoC2022 Student Guideline provides you with lots of useful information on how to get started. Here I just want to emphasize some of the main points:
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compile and run syslog-ng in a test environment
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look around in GitHub issues and try to fix one of the reported problems and/or try to extend syslog-ng with something yourself
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if you get stuck anywhere in the process you can get help on the syslog-ng Gitter channel
You will have many advantages if you submit working code before you submit your proposal: you will be familiar with syslog-ng, you will be able to write a better proposal, and you will have demonstrated your abilities to the syslog-ng team.
Once again: do not be afraid to ask. You can reach us on Gitter: https://gitter.im/syslog-ng/syslog-ng
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If you have questions or comments related to syslog-ng, do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us by email or even chat with us. For a list of possibilities, check our GitHub page under the “Community” section at https://github.com/syslog-ng/syslog-ng. On Twitter, I am available as @PCzanik.