I received notification yesterday that SBCL was accepted as a “mentoring organization” to Google's Summer of Code 2014 programme. What this means is that eligible students can think about applying to be mentored by members of the SBCL team to work on a development project – and to be paid a stipend for that work.

The next steps for students are:

• get involved with the community: join #lisp and #sbcl on the freenode IRC network; read the sbcl-devel mailing list (e.g. at gmane.lisp.steel-bank.devel; have a go at some of the bugs marked as ‘easy’
• look at the existing list of project ideas, and see if any of those ideas would form a good basis for a project that would sustain your interest for three months or so.
• read Paul Khuong's essay on getting started with SBCL from last year: it is still absolutely applicable to this year's programme, or indeed getting into SBCL hacking independently.

The period for student applications to be mentored as part of SBCL's participation is from 10th March until 21st March 2014; for best results, get engaged with the community and potential mentors well before the cutoff point.

Last year two projects were funded, and both completed successfully, even if merging them into the mainline is/was slower than one might like. I'm looking forward to seeing what this year brings!