Cracking Google Summer Of Code

I am a 3rd year Engineering student, hoping to make it to the 4th year. I was born and brought up in Varanasi. It’s a really beautiful city. Coming to Bengaluru was scary- it was my first time in such a big city. But now I love this city. I live in Indiranagar. It’s an amazing place I find so much peace here, people are really friendly and helpful. I could see a lot of budding start-ups in and around this area which just gives me so much energy to work hard and be awesome.

I love writing code and I feel that I’m able to express myself with my code. It’s like a voice given to me to interact with computers. My introduction to FOSS happened through FSMK and later Dgplug. These communities taught me about philosophy and how one can contribute back to the community and I am trying to do the same.

I got know about GSoC from Vignesh who is co-founder of TrippHippe and FSMK volunteer. He gave a talk about what are the prospect and benefits of contributing to open source during FSMK camp. I later started contributing to Fedora and my mentor Pingou and Kushal told me to apply for GSoC. GSoC is Google’s initiative to support open source, this is a three month long program where students all over the world submit their proposals out of which few proposals get through and students are mentored to achieve their goals. There is a monetary support of $5,500.

I fortunately got in GSoC (Google Summer of Code) under Fedora. I am working on a project called Pagure, which is an open source code reviewing system. The experience has been great, the feeling that your code is being used by a lot of people out there gives you a sudden rush. This has been the sole reason for me contributing: it makes me happy.

I’ve attended many tech events, conferences, hackathon’s etc. and I can say that all this is possible mainly because of the fact that I’m in Bangalore. Bangalore is a hub for techies and provides a great networking and learning opportunity. I’ve met many great people, learnt a lot from them and also have started giving back to the tech community by helping others.

If you have any questions about GSoC or would like to get in touch, feel free to drop a note.

Farhaan Bukhsh ,
GSoC’er

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