Paid, competitive, and open to beginners. Most students never apply because nobody told them these exist.
4 paid programmes you have to be selected into, and 2 you can start today — all run by organisations that have nothing to do with this club or this college. We cannot get anybody in. What we can do is make sure you are the kind of contributor they pick.
Start here
No selection, no application. You can do these now.
Neither of these pays and neither carries much weight on a resume. They are still where almost everyone should start, because they teach the mechanics — fork, branch, review, merge — somewhere the stakes are zero.
GirlScript Summer of Code: a three-month Indian open-source programme with assigned mentors and a points leaderboard. Beginner-focused by design, and much easier to get into than anything above.
Who gets in
Open to beginners, including first-years with no merged work at all. This is usually the first name on this page that somebody can act on today.
Timeline
Registrations around the start of the edition, then roughly three months of contribution.
What you get
No stipend. Certificates, swag and a leaderboard — plus mentors, which is the part that is actually worth having.
Who from SST has done it
Nobody has logged one yet. Nothing is stopping you: there is no selection here, so it comes down to turning up when it opens.
Start preparing
Nothing to prepare. Register when it opens and pick a project in a language you can already run. Use it to learn the mechanics — fork, branch, PR, review, merge — so the paid programmes below are not your first time using Git in anger.
A month-long event every October: get a handful of pull requests merged into participating repositories and you get swag. No selection, no application, no stipend.
Who gets in
Anyone. This is the lowest barrier in open source, and the single best month of the year to make a first contribution because half the internet is reviewing pull requests at once.
Timeline
October, every year. Registration opens in late September.
What you get
Swag, or a tree planted in your name. That is the whole reward.
Who from SST has done it
Nobody has logged one yet. Nothing is stopping you: there is no selection here, so it comes down to turning up when it opens.
Start preparing
Have one project picked and built on your machine before 1 October, so you spend the month contributing rather than setting up. Come to a session in September and we will do it with you.
One warning, because we would rather say it than have a maintainer say it to you: the point is not four merged PRs. Hacktoberfest earned a bad reputation from people opening whitespace changes to farm swag, and maintainers still remember. Fix something that was actually broken, or do not open the PR.
You keep the work.
No boss, no timesheet. Everything you write stays public, and stays yours.
Paid and competitive
Somebody else runs the selection. Which is exactly why it counts.
Five programmes that pay a stipend to people with no professional experience. You do not need a degree, a CGPA or a referral for any of them — you need a few months of visible contribution before the window opens.
Google pays you to write code for an open-source organisation over a summer, with a mentor from that organisation assigned to you.
Who gets in
Anyone 18+ who is new to the organisation. You do not need to be a student, and you do not need existing open-source experience.
Timeline
Organisations announced early in the year, applications a few weeks later, coding over the summer.
What it pays
A stipend set by Google, varying by country and project size. Check the current figure on the programme site.
Who from SST has done it
Prateek Singh OWASP · 2026
Ojas Maheshwari KDE · 2026
Parth Dagia Sugar Labs · 2026
Raj Prakash OpenMRS · 2026
Shubham Kumar Mifos Initiative · 2026
Shiva Gupta CDLI · 2026
Kartik Jangid JdeRobot · 2026
Vivek Singh Solanki Checkstyle · 2026
Ujjawal Prabhat OpenMRS · 2026
Piyush Goenka Ruby · 2026
Kartik Deshpande NRNB · 2026
Amrinder Singh Libreswan · 2026
Vansh Dobhal STE||AR Group (HPX) · 2026
Kumar Amityush OpenAstronomy · 2026
Sauhard Gupta · 2025
Start preparing
We start six months early. Selection goes to people the maintainers already recognise, so the work is contributing steadily before applications open — not writing a good proposal in March.
The Linux Foundation's mentorship programme, running across CNCF, Kubernetes, Node.js and the rest of its projects.
Who gets in
Beginners are explicitly the target. Terms run several times a year, so a miss is a few months rather than a year.
Timeline
Three terms annually, so there is almost always one open or opening.
What it pays
A stipend published by the Linux Foundation, scaled by region.
Who from SST has done it
Nobody yet. Which means the first person from this college to get in has not been picked — and there is no queue.
Start preparing
Help you pick a term and project that matches what you already know, and get a first contribution merged into that project before the application closes.
Summer of Bitcoin: a paid summer programme contributing to Bitcoin and Lightning open-source projects.
Who gets in
Students, with a real ramp for people who have never touched the codebase. The C++ is intimidating and the community knows it.
Timeline
Applications early in the year, coding over the summer.
What it pays
A stipend published by the programme.
Who from SST has done it
Nobody yet. Which means the first person from this college to get in has not been picked — and there is no queue.
Start preparing
Work through the onboarding curriculum together, because almost nobody finishes it alone.
Best day: last autumn.
Second best: today. Those are the two options.
The reverse clock
Applications are decided months before they open. Which is why starting now is the whole trick.
Organisations pick contributors they already recognise. By the time a proposal window opens, the people who get in have been committing to that repository since autumn. Waiting a year does not delay you by a year — it costs you the cycle.
Window
Programme
Opens
Start prepping
What you do first
Jan – Apr
Google Summer of Code
Organisations announced late Feb, proposals due late Mar
Sep – Dec
Pick two organisations and get one small patch merged in each. By the time proposals open, the maintainers reviewing yours should already recognise your username.
Rolling, three terms
LFX Mentorship
Terms start around Mar, Jun and Sep
6–8 weeks before a term
The most forgiving entry point, because a miss costs months rather than a year. Choose the term that matches what you already know instead of waiting for the perfect project.
Feb – Jun
Code for GovTech
Cohort announced early in the year
Nov – Jan
Read a digital public infrastructure codebase properly. These are built for national scale rather than for demos, and that is a different reading exercise.
Jan – Aug
Summer of Bitcoin
Applications early in the year, then a multi-week bootcamp
Oct – Dec
Start the onboarding curriculum. Almost nobody finishes it alone, which is most of the reason to do it inside a club.
Pick your path
What you can work on. Start where you are.
01
Mentored contribution
Where almost everyone starts.
A mentor who has already landed work upstream helps you pick a project that genuinely needs help, find an issue sized for a first attempt, and review the patch before a maintainer ever sees it. The goal is your second contribution — once you know a codebase, the next one is much faster.
Higher difficulty. The work most likely to get you noticed.
Open-source AI tooling shipped fast and is now load-bearing. Members find real weaknesses — credentials committed into model configs, checkpoints that execute code on load, agent frameworks letting untrusted input reach a shell — and land the fix upstream through the project's own coordinated disclosure process.
This site is one of them, and it is open source. Working here is the lowest-friction way to get a first merged pull request, because the maintainer reviewing it is someone you can talk to in person.
The applications open in spring. The work that wins them starts in autumn.
Nobody is selected off a proposal alone. Come to a session, pick something small in a repo you like, and be a name the maintainers already recognise by the time it matters.