How I got selected in GSoC’19?
[SPOILER]: This article contains an actual proposal that got accepted in GSoC.
Howdy! 👻
Okay, so now that you’re on this page, I assume that you’re already familiar with Google Summer of Code and you’re here to see how I made it. I assume that you know what it is, what it isn’t, how to prepare for it and how not to. And if you did stumble upon this article out of nowhere, go check out this post by Harshit Dwivedi, our amazing mentor at Coding Blocks to know all the bits and pieces about this wonderful program by Google.
About me
So, who am I?
I’m Abhishek Sansanwal (well that’s written on the top, but anyway :P), a second-year undergraduate student from MSIT. I run a company called Verved, it’s a tech firm and created Verved edProgram (that’s another venture of Verved 🤝). I’ve worked with companies like Google, RSS, Xenottabyte, Coding Blocks, International Organisation of Software Developers, etc. on a number of projects.
If you wanna know more about me head over to my website, but for now, let’s cut to the chase. I write iOS apps, and that’s what I’m doing in Google Summer of Code.
How did I get selected?
Before I get into what I specifically did, let’s take a look at the typical “what does it take to crack GSoC?” points:-
- An early start
- Observing previous years organizations and coming up with own ideas for projects before they are announced by Google
- Great profile, astounding coding skills
- Sexy amount of contributions
- A solid proposal
Hmm, I guess that’s pretty much it!
Now talking about what I did.. not do, I didn’t do any of those except writing a killer proposal (yeah, that’s true.. not to boast, but I’m quite f*cking proud of my proposal!)
I started thinking about GSoC two days after the organizations were announced, and started contributing on around 1st March. So, as the general pattern of GSoC, I started looking for organizations that had projects in my field i.e. iOS. There were around 4 or 5 organizations that had iOS development projects but I narrowed down to two orgs that matched more to my skills and specific fields of my interest.
They were:
And,
After selecting the two orgs, I started digging into their iOS projects. I started reading about the organizations, checked out their IRC channels and public links, introduced myself and cloned both the orgs repositories and my coding juices started flowing. If you want to know about the organizations, check out their projects on the GSoC website.
I spent a day or two hanging out on both the orgs’ public channels and seeing the crowd on rocket.chat, I felt a little lost (scared :P). But nonetheless, I tried getting the attention of the mentors in both the organizations and.. a few days went by, and I found myself rocking and rolling with Amahi.
I actually wanted to work on rocket.chat because their project was something very different and exciting, but I kind of got addicted to working on Amahi’s iOS app. Now, the time that we’re talking about is 5th or 7th March. I had made 2 minor contributions to Amahi’s project (some bug fixes). And by 20th March, I made around 2 other major contributions. At that point, it was pretty clear to me that Amahi was the sole organization that I was going to be applying to (which scared the sh*t out of me as all my seniors had advised me to apply to a minimum of three!).
The day is 21st March, and I’m still thinking of how to improve my proposal. Ow, talking about the proposal, I spent around 10 days to finish it (but that was very weak an effort, had I put in 3 consistent hours for like a day or two, I’d be totally cool and ready with my proposal :P). I took help from a few of my friends, asked for their feedback and then finally submitted my first (and last) draft. Unfortunately, every mentor in Amahi was busy so I couldn’t get my draft reviewed and had to make the final submission with my fingers crossed just three days before the deadline (which was 9th April).
Then it was time to deal with issues in college (attendance, marks, practicals), so I couldn’t make time to work on Amahi (which is strictly not advised, well.. I’ll put this point a few lines later!).
Then what?
It was time for the unexpected! Why, you ask?
Honestly, I had given up hope on getting selected in Google Summer of Code because of the competition and my very late start. But it wasn’t the time to live in the past, but to pinch myself and trust what my eyes were reading.
But.. why on earth did they select me?
It was quite a shock to me but when the days went by and I returned from cloud nine, I thought about my GSoC journey rationally.
Here are three things that got me selected:-
- Communication with the mentors: One hundred percent true, time to think about the number of times I talked to the mentors, reviewed other’s contributions, helped people by replying to general questions on Amahi’s IRC channel, I was quite heavily active in the community. In fact, one time when we had a community hangout session, the mentor/orgs admin recognized me and said, “Abhishek, you’ve been quite active on channels and you have done a great job on the thumbnail previews” (Heck yeah! 😎). Also, never send a direct message to the mentors. The foundation of Google Summer of Code is open source, so whatever you need to talk about, do it in public channels within the community.
- My contributions: In total, I made about 5–6 contributions to Amahi’s iOS project, two of which were actually the major things that were mentioned in Amahi’s plan for the GSoC period.
- My proposal: I did a lot of research before finalizing my complete proposal (and I do mean “a lot”!). I took inspiration from previously selected GSoC projects (this is NOT advised, because straight copying could get your proposal rejected right away). I designed the ideas using tools on my MacBook and made them look very realistic like actual screenshots from the app. I included the exact methods/lines of code that I’ll be writing to implement those ideas and mentioned clearly the ones that I did not have enough knowledge about (which is OK, you do have to sell your best self to make a good impression but admitting things that aren’t your strengths is also a great move!).
Here’s the link to my proposal: 🏆
My final bits..
Getting into Google Summer of Code is easy, it is not rocket science. But to get in easily, you have to work hard. I remember not sleeping for days in a row to just mentally think about the proposal, my contributions, GSoC in general and the pressure from college. But isn’t everything worth it not a piece of cake?
A lot of you might think that my profile was strong enough already to have them select me, but honestly, it didn’t matter at all. You don’t have to be from the crème de la crème of India, the IITs, IIITs, etc. and neither do you have to be a pro when it comes to coding. Yes, a decent understanding of and self-confidence in your field is for sure required. But other than that, take care of the points you read in this article, don’t start late (it is a risk!), understand the code-base and the architecture of the project carefully (a guy in Amahi committed the confidential files to GitHub, and.. that was his Endgame, the Thanos in his mind had snapped their fingers :P).
Also, in this article, I’d like to thank my mentors who did help me to finalize ideas for my proposal. A big thanks to Coding Blocks for sheltering me since school 😝. Thanks to my seniors Samar Sunkaria, Chashmeet Singh, Manoj Pandey, Tejasav Khattar and Prakhar Srivastava for being a huge inspiration!
