Google Summer of Code 2018 — Haskell.org
How it started
I started contributing to Open Source in 2017 and soon came to know about the Google Summer of Code program. I found it to be a very good platform for working on open source projects and this motivated me to apply for it this year. Going through the list of accepted organizations on GSoC site, ‘Haskell.org’ caught my attention. One of the reasons behind this was that I was planning to master some functional programming language since some time but wasn’t able to do so. I thought that this might be a really good opportunity for me to learn Haskell while working on some project of my interest. Hence, I started checking out the website and the ideas list to find some worthy project. But, I found that my skills didn’t align with most of the projects mentioned there and so I contacted some members of the Haskell community. After discussing some viable project ideas with the community members, I found that working on Haskell Image Processing (HIP) package was best suited to my interests.
After finalizing the project, I began researching into the the algorithms which could be implemented for the HIP package. Keeping in mind the viability and applicability of the modules to be added, I narrowed down my list to 8 state of the art algorithms. After confirming these with the probable mentors of my project, I set out to draft a nice proposal for the proposed project. Finally, after incorporating the changes suggested by the reviewers, I submitted my final proposal 5 hours prior to the deadline.
The D-Day
23rd April, The day of the announcement of results came and I was really nervous about what was going to happen. Finally the results were out sharp at 09:30pm IST, and I searched my name through the list of selected students in Haskell.org and there it was like this:
I was really overwhelmed by this and immediately began speculating how my summer this year was gonna be and the cool things which I would work on under Haskell.org. An hour later, I got my email confirmation from GSoC :
The Road Ahead
I knew that getting accepted was just the start and that now I’ll be spending my entire summer working with Haskell community under the guidance of my mentor Alp Mestanogullari.
May 14th 2018, marked the end of the Community Bonding period of GSoC 2018 wherein we got to know more about the community, its members, our mentors and admins. I got more familiar with the code-base of the HIP package and discussed the timeline of the project with my mentor.
With the advent of Coding phase of GSoC, I began implementing my very first algorithm -Hough Transform. I plan to implement many more algorithms this summer and will shortly come up with other blog posts describing the algorithms I implement.
I really look forward to work on the cool algorithms and will try my best to make this project a success!
Thank you,
GSoC 2018 Student
Khilan Ravani.