If you are a college student (or know a college student) who does programming and is interested in 3D coding - Blender will be participating in the ‘Google Summer of Code’ again this year. Essentially Google funds students to work on open source software projects over the summer.
Here is the page of ideas
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2017/Ideas
and here is information about the requirements to apply
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/GoogleSummerOfCode/2017/Students
There is all sorts of fun stuff that a budding tech artist might enjoy working on (digital sculpting, painting, rendering, motion tracking, modeling tools, format support, video editing and compositing, animation tools, etc.)
If you are interested the students link above lists our mailing list address, irc channel and other ways to contact us.
Tom M.
LetterRip