Community:SummerOfCode18:Brainstorming
From MozillaWiki
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.
2018 Project List
| Title | Details | Skills Needed | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Additional Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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) | Full description - Improve test manifest workflow and performance | |
| 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) | ||
| Native Android XML support in Mozilla localization infrastrucure | Mozilla develops software for various platforms, one of which is Android. Localizations of Android apps are typically stored in the XML dialect, which is not supported by Pontoon, Mozilla's localization tool. That means our localization process is unnecessarily complicated, because we need to convert between Android XML files and files supported by our localization tools. Your task will be to solve this problem by writing translation quality checks for compare-locales and adding support for the XML dialect to Pontoon. | Python | Matjaž Horvat (Mozilla) | Axel Hecht (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) | ||
| Iodide Notebook | The Iodide Notebook is a pure client-side browser-based IDE and publication tool for scientific computing and computational inquiry using web technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, WebAssembly). It provides a Jupyter-style notebook interface, granting scientists full access to the power of the DOM and browser APIs within a familiar iterative workflow, and with zero overhead -- absolutely no software installation and configuration is required, so people can seamlessly learn from and extend the work of others.
Students will contribute to: extending the functionality of the notebook; making the notebook code more robust and performant; helping to shape the user experience; and creating example notebooks. |
JS; HTML; CSS; React/Redux; familiarity with at least one scientific computing language preferred (ex: MATLAB, Mathematica, Julia, Numpy/Scipy, R, etc). Science/math background is a major plus. | Brendan Colloran (bcolloran@mozilla.com) | Brendan Colloran (bcolloran@mozilla.com) | In addition to helping to build the notebook, actively dogfooding it will be an essential part of our work. This means that students with a scientific and/or applied math background will be encouraged to build example notebooks that demonstrate visualizations, simulations, data analyses, etc., on topics of their choosing. In addition to mentoring students on software development, we will provide mentorship in scientific computing and data science. | |
| 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) | This project can largely be a generic read-only websocket proxy for RabbitMQ, refer to our issue for more details. | |
| Redash - Improve user experience of STMO | Mozilla runs an instance of the Open Source project Redash, a data analysis and dashboarding tool that has been customized and configured for use with a number of the Firefox organization's data sets. It provides low barrier access to the vast amount of Firefox Telemetry data (and others) to make product decisions for Firefox and others projects. | Languages or skills needed: Python, JavaScript, HTML | Jannis Leidel (jezdez) (Mozilla) | Jannis Leidel (jezdez) (Mozilla) | Knowing SQL or having experience with data analysis is not a hard requirement to work on user experience improvements of the Redash tool itself. Instead this GSoC project is targeted at web developers who enjoy improving tools that have a great impact on how Firefox is developed. Please also see the Firefox data documentation for a more detailed introduction into Mozilla's Redash instance. A goal of this GSoC project is to upstream all improvements made to the upstream Redash project when possible. | |
| Automatically detect web compatibility issues | Build a tool to automatically detect web compatibility issues using machine learning tools. | Python (knowing Keras or having experience with machine learning is a plus) | Marco (:marco) (Mozilla) | Marco (:marco) (Mozilla) | The project involves collecting data (screenshots of websites in different browsers), labeling it, training a neural network to automatically detect when a website is rendered differently in different browsers. | |
| Autogeneration of style structs in Servo's style system | Prototype how to run cbindgen on Servo's style system values module to auto-generate style struct definitions for C++ and Rust, which would enable the removal of 5k+ lines of unsafe and slow Rust <-> C++ conversion code. This can be done on a per-struct basis, so prototyping the general mechanism with a simple one like color would be the first step, migrating more and more as time goes on. | Primarily Rust (though no need to be really advanced), probably a bit Python for build system integration, and basic C++ since it needs to get generated. | It may need to move the style::values component into a standalone crate as a prerequisite for some of the most complex structs, but that should be easy. | emilio | emilio | |
| Timely Security Analytics | InfoSec uses the Mozilla Defense Platform, MozDef to aggregate logs and alert on time series. This project seeks to create a structure for extract, transform, load operations (ETL) to process these time series events using MapReduce. | Languages or skills needed: Python, Scala, Javascript, ETL, AWS/GCP, Data Science Fundamentals, Apache Spark, Pig, or other big data. | [https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/akrug/ Andrew Krug :akrug (mozilla) | [https://mozillians.org/en-US/u/akrug/ Andrew Krug :akrug (mozilla)
[1] Michal Purzynski :michal` (mozilla) |
Aggregation of disparate sources of data: NSM, CloudTrail, etc. into spark. Real-time alerts over large quantities of data. | |
| C++ Static Analysis | Add new checkers specific to our base code. | Strong C++ experience and clang infrastructure. | Sylvestre | Andi | In order to tackle issues during the development phase, Mozilla wrote a bunch of static analyzers checkers based on clang-tidy. In this project, we will focus on writing more checkers (either generic to C/C++ or specific to Gecko programming patterns). | |
| Download Spam Protection for Firefox | In Firefox, we want websites to go through a permission prompt if they want to initiate several downloads in an automated (not user-initiated) fashion. The project will involve implementing a permission prompt, implementing the logic of when it should be triggered, and collecting data (via telemetry, etc) on how users interact with the prompt in order to verify how the feature behaves. | Good JavaScript experience and a basic understand of how the web works. | Johann (:johannh) | Nihanth (:nhnt11) | A more detailed description can be found here | |
| "MDN in English" Web Extension | There are several visitors who prefer to read MDN Web Docs in English, but browse the web in their native language, such as German. However, search results from Google and other engines take them to their native-language pages, and MDN picks the native language in other cases. The project will be to develop an extension for Firefox (and Chrome as a stretch goal) that helps these users get the English pages, by presenting an English-preferred Accept-Language header on developer.mozilla.org, redirecting when arriving from an external site, and providing a one-click interface to switch to English. | JavaScript and web experience, and a willingness to learn extensions | John Whitlock (:jwhitlock) | John Whitlock (:jwhitlock) | A cookie-based partial solution was implemented, and gathered several duplicates from users looking for solutions. | |
| Multi-tab select in Firefox | This project will focus on adding multiple-select functionality to the tab strip in Firefox. The selected student will teach Firefox to know about multiple tabs being selected, while also adding functionality to close, and move to new window. | JavaScript, CSS, and web experience | Jared Wein (:jaws) | Jared Wein (:jaws) | You can learn more by reading the bug on Bugzilla, but note that the comments there stem back multiple years as people have been wanting this feature for a long time. While working on this you will become very familiar with the Browser Toolbox, our own "Inspector" tool for the browser user-interface, as well as writing automated tests for the new feature you're adding. Most of our tab-selection code lives within our tabbrowser.xml file, which you can browse around if you're interested to see how some operations work. | |
| Improve Enigmail User Experience | Enigmail is an add-on for Thunderbird that adds OpenPGP-based email encryption and authentication. This is a Thunderbird project that focuses on improving the user interface for Enigmail, such that it fits better into the general Thunderbird UI and makes user experience smoother. The goal of this project is to lower the entry-barrier for non-experts to use encryption by simplifying the existing core workflows and tasks. The main areas to work on are initial setup, sending and reading mails. | JavaScript, HTML/XUL and CSS | Patrick Brunschwig (:pbrunschwig), Philipp Kewisch (:Fallen) | Patrick Brunschwig (:pbrunschwig) | List your top 3 pain points in the Enigmail UI, and what you would do to fix them. | |
| ..your project here! |
