Stand Up, Mentor! Help Postgres Shine in GSoC 2026!

Created in January 14, 2026

2026   ·   gsoc   community   postgresql   personal

Google Summer of Code is back for 2026! We’re celebrating the 22nd year of this incredible program that has brought countless talented developers into the open-source world. Please take a moment to review Google’s announcement and familiarize yourself with what makes this year special.

Now is the time to work on getting together a strong set of projects we’d like to have GSoC contributors work on over the summer. Like previous years, we must have an excellent Ideas list ready before the deadline for mentoring organizations. This list is the primary criterion Google uses to evaluate and accept us into the program.

The deadline for Mentoring organizations to apply is February 3, 2026 at 18:00 UTC. The list of accepted organizations will be published on February 19. Here’s the complete timeline for your planning:

GSoC 2026 Timeline:

  • January 19: Organization Applications Open
  • February 3 (18:00 UTC): Deadline for Organization Applications
  • February 19: Accepted Organizations Announced
  • March 16 – 31: Contributor Application Period
  • April 2: Deadline for Final Proposals
  • May 4: Community Bonding Begins

I’ve already created our GSoC 2026 Ideas page as our central hub for project submissions. The quality of this Ideas list will define the tone of our participation this year, so let’s make it outstanding!

What Makes a Great Project Idea?

Each project on our Ideas page should include these essential elements:

  1. Project Title and Description (2-5 sentences that clearly explain the project)
  2. Expected Outcomes (what will be delivered)
  3. Required/Preferred Skills (programming languages, technologies, domain knowledge)
  4. A potential mentor (two mentors are highly recommended)
  5. Project Size: Small (90 hours), Medium (175 hours), or Large (350 hours)
  6. Difficulty Rating: Easy, Medium, or Hard

Critical Guidelines to Remember:

Never link to just a bug tracker as your project description. This leads to automatic rejection by Google. Keep descriptions high-level enough to allow contributor creativity, but avoid being vague. We want to inspire innovation while providing clear direction.

We’re aiming for a diverse mix of projects including “Low-hanging fruit” for newcomers, “Core development” challenges for experienced contributors, and “Infrastructure” improvements that benefit the entire ecosystem.

PostgreSQL as an Umbrella Project

As with previous years, please consider PostgreSQL to be an “Umbrella” project. Anything that would be regarded as part of the “PostgreSQL Family” per our News/Announce policy is likely to be acceptable as a PostgreSQL GSoC project.

This means if you’re a contributor or developer working on patroni, WAL-G, barman, pgBackRest, pgwatch, pgagroal, pgexporter, pgmoneta, pgpool, pgbouncer, the PostgreSQL website (pgweb), pgAdmin4, DBeaver, HeidiSQL, pldebugger, pspg, the JDBC driver, the ODBC driver, or any of the many other PostgreSQL Family projects, please feel free to add a project for consideration!

How You Can Help

Having at least two mentors per project is not just recommended but essential to decrease the individual load and provide better support to our contributors. Please consider listing yourself as a co-mentor for projects with only one mentor listed.

If you have ideas from previous years that are still relevant, update them for 2026. Make sure to revise all the information, particularly listing yourself as a mentor and updating the project scope to be reasonable for the time contributors are given.

New entries are absolutely welcome and encouraged! Projects from last year that were worked on but had significant follow-on work to be completed are also welcome just update the description appropriately.

Remember Our Greater Mission

The program’s goals extend far beyond code writing. One of our primary objectives is to inspire new developers to begin participating in open-source communities and help open-source projects identify and bring in new long-term contributors. Every mentor interaction is an opportunity to welcome someone into our wonderful PostgreSQL community.

When we get closer to submitting our application, I’ll clean out any outdated entries that haven’t received updates. If any projects are no longer appropriate because they were completed independently, please feel free to remove them.

Let’s make GSoC 2026 another fantastic year for PostgreSQL and our entire ecosystem! Your participation as mentors and project contributors is what makes this program successful year after year.

PGForce be with you!

Best regards,
Pavlo Golub,
on behalf of PostgreSQL GSoC Admins 💙💛