My GSoC Journey
Tl;Dr
Yes, It can be tough, but what matter is your punctuality and consistency.
Flashback
Well, I got to know about GSoC in 2015 from Quora, when the only thing I knew about coding was to print a star(asterisk) pyramid in C language.I got very inspired by reading about journeys of many GSoC students. At that time, I decided no matter what, I will definitely grab GSoC’er tag at least once in my college tenure.
Oct-Dec 2017
I scanned all repositories of openSUSE. OSEM project was frequent in past GSoC project but there were already many other contributors who were building that project day by day. At that time I just wanted to contribute in open source so, I chose a repo with lesser number of contributors, Agile team Dashboard, Since I felt they need love too :P. While contributing, I learnt a lot about git and its “powers”. In openSUSE, code quality and even commit is written in an acceptable open source manner, it was all new for me and so I got good insight about how large projects are maintained and various other good Developer habits.
Why openSUSE?
To be honest, I didn’t contribute in any open source project before this time. So I didn’t knew about many organizations. I already knew about OpenSUSE by reading blogs about their participation in Open Source. For example they are one of leading contributor to Linux kernel. And after reading blog of one of my friend and GSoC’er 2017, that openSUSE is one of the beginner friendly.
So, by all these factors I thought of getting started with OpenSUSE myself :). And, I found it to be true, openSUSE is really very beginner friendly. In OpenSUSE, project maintainers helped Contributors to resolve issues in their pull request even if it took months to resolve.
January-February
As GSoC was near I thought of getting in full throttle for GSoC, I picked up 2–3repos in openSUSE organization only and worked on them simultaneously. I found many bugs and created many issues and pull requests for resolving issues in this period. I also tried to help other contributors like me because that’s what open source is for :).
As February strikes in, projects for GSoC were declared. I became interested in Hackweek and believed that i can do what is asked in project description within 3 months. So, I started collecting required resources and information regarding the project beforehand.
March
Proposal writing period was coming near. I thought it would be a piece of cake to write a proposal. But oh boy.. i was so wrong about this one. It took me about 3 day just to think about the wire frame of my proposal and about another 6–7 days for writing and improving it. In a GSoC proposal, I knew that it doesn’t matter how a proposal looks but still I applied Airbnb’s complexion reduction technique to make the proposal more readable :P
April
This period felt longest for me as I waited everyday for the result. During this period, I was so into GSoC and openSUSE that even in my sleep I started having dreams of getting selected, rejected, working etc.!! xD. So basically, I was just waiting for the result to come through, every single day!
Finally, After a long wait from 27th March to 23rd April, Google rolled out the names of the selected students. I checked my dashboard on GSoC’s website, ever so tremblingly and oh yeah! I made it! I was selected in openSUSE for Improve people collaboration in Hackweek project.
April 23, 2018, will always be one of the dates that I’ll always cherish.
My Mentors
OpenSUSE assigned David Kang and Stella Rouzi as mentors for my GSoC’s Hackweek Project.
David himself is a software developer at SUSE and he is one of active collaborator of Open Build Service(OBS) project under openSUSE and Agile Team Dashboard. OBS is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. You can release packages as well as updates, add-ons, appliances and entire distributions for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures. And Agile team dashboard is a web application that provides a dashboard for agile teams.
Stella is the top contributor of Open Source Event Manager (OSEM) project. OSEM is event management tool tailored to Free and Open Source Software conferences which is used by various open source organizations. She has been an active member of OpenSUSE since 2013. She has also been mentor for OSEM project in GSoC 2017.
A Little About Myself
Currently, I am pursuing Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science (2015–2019), from Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. I am self-taught developer. I believe in open source software movement. I like to build things from scratch. I am newbie in open source world and openSUSE is my first organization where i am contributing.
Apart from coding, I like to solve puzzles and play games (PUBG is love). Favorite music genre : Symphony rock (like : this). Binge watcher. Favorite Movie genre : Science fiction or thriller. I like to read, but i don’t read novels. I can spend hours on one go, reading encyclopedias or science mags ツ.
Please find the appropriate link below should anyone choose to view my code/progress or have a social conversation.
In the end,
I would like to acknowledge and extend my heartfelt gratitude to Ana Maria Martinez Gomez, David Kang, Stella Rouzi and many other openSUSE developers and contributors for helping me out whenever I got stuck somewhere and getting me started in my open source journey.
OpenSUSE rocks! Open Source rocks! (⌐■_■)
