GSoC ’17: Getting in GSoC


Getting selected for GSoC ’17 under Ceph
It was a very exciting moment when I came to know that I got selected for GSoC. I literally felt like running in corridors of my hostel. Unfortunately, next day I had my final assessment exam so I had to control myself a bit, and focus on my studies. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that I got less marks because I was so excited to sit down and focus on my studies that day. ;)
About my project
I was selected under the organisation Ceph, to work on its project ceph-mgr: Cluster Status Dashboard. Under this project I have contributed to the UI of the Ceph dashboard by adding visualizations for various performance metrics to it. I came across Ceph when I was going through the organisations listed for GSOC 2017. Ceph grabbed my interest because it is a hybrid object storage platform, which seemed to be very intriguing to me. Ceph stands out by being an free and open-source object storage platform. Being open source makes Ceph highly reliable as it is backed by a community of developers who are working constantly to improve it. You can read more about Ceph here.
Getting connected with various communities
Within a few days I was spending a lot of my time on IRC channels and mailing lists (and mailing list archives), trying to get more involved in the Ceph Community. Also I got to know about other GSoCers who got selected under Ceph. I was very happy to find out that two of them were from my country, India. We got together on Google Hangouts, and had some very interesting chats about each other. I was also invited to join the Telegram and Facebook groups for GSoC. It was truly a one-of-a-kind experience to interact with the students from all around the world, each working on entirely different kinds of projects. These two groups are the best groups, not because they have GSoCers as their members, but because of the discussions that people have there. I learned about so many different kinds of tech out there in the world in various domains of Computer Science. Also, many people shared their projects other than their GSoC project, which motivated me a lot to build new stuff from various kinds of tech I know.
I came to know much more experienced students who are always there to share their insights on various topics. It is an experience which you cannot get anywhere else, in my opinion.
