Google summer of code 2019 and how to get selected.
Hello everyone, after a long time I was able to find a little piece of time to spend on writing. And today I’m going to explain what is GSoC and how to get selected for GSoC as per my point of view. And this article might important to you if you’re a computer science or related undergraduate.
So, What is Google Summer of Code or GSoC? If you google it you can find out their own definition from GSoC official website, https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/
But as per my point of view, it is like the final ride in the chicken run movie. A ride you can use to fly out to anywhere in the world but you should decide the destination carefully and work for it. Because there is no coming back.
How to get selected for GSoC? well, I would say it is a little bit tricky. You need to have some sort of skills. If you’re expecting to participate GSoC 2020 prepare from now on. I was preparing for GSoC since the very first day I found that I haven’t got selected for GSoC 2018. Think it is like a job interview, but from google.
First, try to make a good online presence, Have a good LinkedIn, Facebook and your own blog posts about some technical stuff. Then earn some reputation on StackOverflow, Reddit, XDA developers like forums. Then work on GitHub, have some repositories and contribute to some FOSS. Your efforts will mark in there.
Once you’re good with them then do some research about GSoC. It is always good to do have background research before you intend to do anything. Find out what organizations keep selecting consecutively for the past few years. They have good potential for getting selected for the next time as well. Among them find out what projects do they have and what suits you most. have good confidence about what you’re capable of when you selecting a project.
But the next big issue is the number of contributors. If your choice has lots of forks and that means more contributors. So you have a competition of being the best from the undergraduate contributors. Because GSoC in only for undergraduates. But it is not a big issue if you’re confident with your skills.
Join with the project mailing lists and ask that you like to contribute and from where do you need to start to contribute. If they reply you quickly, that means it is an active project. Some projects are not much active therefore they take too much time to reply. So the best choice is to select an active project.
Be as early as possible. Once the organizations announced by Google. go to the organization’s link quickly and shoot a message by saying that you would like to contribute this project as GSoC. Most of the time mentors allocate FCFS but some do not. But being first always better.
Finally, do some contributions even before applying. Find out issues, fix some issues, give some pull requests etc. So be aware of the project. If you are able to merge maybe two or three pull requests, chances are very high. And always have good practices when working on Git. Use good English for communicating.
So I think this article did give you a good idea about what is GSoC and some value points to get selected for future GSoCs .So, Best of luck !!.