GSoC ’18 — Application Phase & Community Bonding
My Open Source journey started when I was in third year at college. The first organization to which I contributed was Mozilla. It is truly a tremendous feeling when your first patch is accepted. Google Summer of Code is a platform where aspiring students can work with some of the awesome Open Source Communities all around the world.
I have always spent my college vacations working with startup companies as an intern. But, this time I was very much eager and excited to spend summer working full time on an open source project. And this is how I found Intermine, University of Cambridge. Open Source Software is all about community. A large number of people all around the globe come together and work on some of the extremely cool projects. It is a great learning experience for everyone. Google has taken an initiative to promote Open Source Culture through its GSoC program. Students get an opportunity to work with great teams and learn new technologies. It is an excellent learning experience and there are some more perks too ;)
As I mentioned, I already had a good experience with working in an open source environment. Apart from this, my internship experiences also helped me to work on large codebases. These two things helped me to prepare my project proposal. I started fixing issues on the Intermine repositories 10 days before the organizations were announced. Fixing issues and interacting with the community helped me in understanding the existing codebase. I tried to find projects relevant to my skill-set. Though, I jumped into some issues which were not at all related with my profile and experience, yet I was successful in fixing those as well. The application phase is very crucial as the applicant needs to choose the project and start writing proposal for it. The applicant should have a clear idea about how the project is to be implemented. One should spend time to understand the existing code and documentations also. The GSoC applicants are judged on the basis of their project proposals. So, more time should be utilized in making good quality proposals. Applying to more than one project in GSoC is often very beneficial as there might be chances that one of the projects might not get selected. This year Google allowed every applicant to apply for atmost 3 projects, so I applied for 3 projects in Intermine only. I submitted proposals for Cross Intermine Search Tool, Automated Test Suite for Bluegenes, and Intermine Data Browser Tool. Finally, I got selected for the Cross Intermine Search Tool.
The GSoC community bonding phase is already over and I have started working on the project. The Community Bonding Phase is for students to get well introduced with their mentors and start with the plan for the upcoming three months of Coding Phase. I invite all of you to join us in developing awesome things in the open source world which will be used by a very large part of the society. Happy Coding folks :)
Read my interview with Intermine here: https://intermineorg.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/gsoc-student-interview-spotlight-cross-intermine-search-tool-aman-dwivedi/