Yesterday, Google announced the 1116 students that were accepted for this year’s edition of the Google Summer of Code, 5 of which will be working with the XMPP Standards Foundation. We’re very happy to welcome both Tobias Markmann and Vlad Voicu, who will be working full-time on Swift this summer, implementing file transfer support and conversation history respectively.

We have to mention that these weren’t the only proposals we received. Most of the proposals we received this year were of good quality: we suspect that the teaser tasks we put up for potential students made it possible for both the students and us to get an idea up front of what should be expected. However, based on experience from previous years, we decided we should only accept 2 students, to ensure that we could give our full attention to making all projects successful (including fast integration into a Swift release). We’re convinced that both Vlad and Tobias will live up to their expectations, and implement some of the most requested Swift features today!