Firstly, a very happy new year from us at Ensembl. We spent last year adapting to the new and exciting challenges with the reopening of the Wellcome Genome campus. Like other research institutes around the world, EMBL EBI has risen to the occasion, acting swiftly to safeguard staff and students and embracing the new ways of hybrid working in creative and bold ways. 

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The Ensembl “Geek for a Week” experience is a way for Ensembl software developers and our scientific collaborators to work in an intensive environment for short periods of time on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK. Visiting “Geeks” will be assigned a desk within the Ensembl team at the EMBL-EBI and have an opportunity to work on their project with direct access to the developers who built the tools and the Ensembl scientists using these for data analysis. Here, we meet Yeorgia Argirou, who joined us in November 2022 as a “Geek for a Week”.

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Today’s blog focuses on this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is an international program founded by Google in 2005 with the purpose of bringing together open-source organisations, and developers interested in contributing to open-source software and getting an “exposure to real-world software development techniques”. Host organisations list project ideas, and applicants discuss these ideas directly with mentors from the organisations and devise a project proposal to Google, who issue a small stipend to successful applicants.

EMBL-EBI’s Genome Assembly and Annotation (GAA) section, which includes Ensembl, has been a GSoC mentor since 2016. The GAA is one of 198 open-source organisations who have undergone rigorous application and selection processes to ensure GSoC applicants, also referred to as contributors, are receiving the best possible mentorship for their projects. We are grateful that we have once again had the opportunity to work with Google and help contributors realise their projects. Every year we receive applications from candidates who want to learn more about writing open-source software. And as of 2022, Google has also welcomed applications not just from students, but anyone over the age of 18 with an interest in open-source software development. 

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