May 13, 2019
My Journey Into Google Summer of Code — 2019
In this blog, I plan to go over my project plan for Google Summer of Code, 2019.
A Little Bit About Myself
Before I get started about my journey getting accepted into Google Summer of Code — 2019 with Pharo Consortium, I’ll start with a brief introduction about myself. My name is Nikhil Pinnaparaju and I’m currently a 3rd-year undergraduate student at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India (IIIT-H).
I am pursuing a Dual Degree a B.Tech in Computer Science and a Masters in Computational Linguistics by Research known as CLD. This basically means that we learn a lot about language processing techniques. And as such my primary area of expertise is Natural Language Processing and Text-Based Information Retrieval.
What is Google Summer of Code?
Google Summer of Code is a 3-month long program aimed at promoting Open Source Development around the world. Google Summer of Code, commonly referred to as GSoC is a very popular program and the dream of many students around the world. GSoC provides a wonderful platform for you to work with fantastic organizations and people all around the globe and is truly a priceless opportunity for any student.
It helps a student polish so many skills — not only Coding but Communication, Presentation, Planning, Design and that’s only to name a few.
There are some really, really great blogs out there on how to prepare for and apply for GSoC, some of which I’ll link below:-
- https://medium.com/@i.oleks/how-to-apply-for-google-summer-of-code-95c1bfcd41a5
- https://medium.com/coding-blocks/one-stop-guide-to-google-summer-of-code-a9e803beeda7
Getting Accepted into GSoC
Two things that I would like to mention as being crucial to my acceptance, according to me are:-
- Genuine Interest in my Project.
- Regular Contact and Guidance from my Mentors.
Without either of those two things, I don’t think I would be here writing this blog today.
For my GSoC Project, I will be building a Natural Language Processing Library for Pharo. The library aims at providing key functionality like Tokenization, Stemming, N-grams, TF-IDF Vectorization and more. You can find my in-depth project proposal here — https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vsO5xpJ-ZXQhiYPwlsQpaXjRife7Nrfi6ZdA5if3vWw/edit?usp=sharing.
I’ll be uploading a blog every week, going over my attempts at implementation, why something works, why something doesn’t, implementational details and this like that. This is the first post for an exciting summer in front of me. For the upcoming blogs, be sure to follow me on Twitter (https://twitter.com/NPinnaparaju) or on Medium here.
