I’m excited to announce a new internship program we’re running with the High School of Mathematics “Akademik Kiril Popov” in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. After the Compiler Research Group’s deep technical work in 2024 — advances in Clad and CppInterOp, tighter integration with ROOT and CUDA, and the growth of a genuinely global open-source community — it felt natural to open the door wider and invite motivated high-school students to join us.

This program is for 10th-grade students who want an honest, hands-on introduction to low-level compiler and systems engineering. Our goal is simple and direct: move students from curiosity to contribution. We’ll give them the tools, structure, and mentorship they need to make real, upstreamed changes in open-source projects.

What students will learn:

  • Practical version control and collaboration: Git, GitHub workflows, code review etiquette, and Software Carpentry best practices.
  • Technical communication: writing concise technical proposals and documenting work so others can build on it.
  • Systems and compiler work: WebAssembly and xeus-cpp tutorial development, understanding compilation pipelines, and small tooling projects.
  • Accelerated GPU exposure: foundations of CUDA and how to reason about performance and correctness on GPUs.
  • Open-source contribution: preparing patches, working with maintainers, and upstreaming changes to projects like CppInterOp.
  • Project work: building agent-based simulations in Python, pairing with mentors, and delivering a short public tutorial or demo.

Students often learn concepts in school but rarely see how those concepts translate into engineered systems or community impact. That gap is what we want to close. From my perspective, the most valuable outcomes are not just polished code or a CV line — they are the habits: clear writing, iterative design, collaboration across timezones, and the discipline to follow an idea through to a merged contribution.

Our group knows that small, well-mentored tasks lead to early wins: interns gain confidence, maintainers gain useful patches, and the whole project benefits. This program formalizes that pattern and creates a repeatable path for new contributors.

With enough motivation and perserverance they will make their first impactful open source contributions very soon!