Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2019: Oppia’s Learnings & Reflections
Oppia has been a proud project sponsor for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the past 4 years, and this year was no exception. In an effort to continue supporting the program and discover new ways that we can improve how we support future GSoC students, two of our developers, Sandeep and Apurv, attended the GSoC Mentor Summit in Munich. This post was guest-written by both of them so that they may share what they learned and did while at the conference.
This year, the Oppia Foundation participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Mentor Summit in Munich, Germany on Oct 17, 18, 19 and 20, 2019. The GSoC 2019 summit was special as this year was the 15th year of the Google Summer of Code program, so the summit was extended to a long 3.5 days! The Mentor Summit is not a typical conference where you go, sit, and listen to what the speakers have to say; instead it’s entirely an unconference summit where participants are invited to fill the time with their own topics of discussion, learn and network with mentors from other organizations, and make GSoC a better program.
This year Apurv Bajaj and I (Sandeep Dubey) attended the summit on behalf of the organization. It was our first GSoC mentor summit and we were very excited and curious to attend.
(Sandeep) Day 1: October 17
The first international trip is always a surprise. I had some fear and excitement leading up to the event, so instead of taking a direct flight from my city, I traveled from Bangalore to Delhi in order to join Apurv. This was the first time in my 3 years with the Oppia foundation team that I was going to meet someone in-person. I met Apurv at Delhi metro and we traveled together to the airport through the metro. I came to know that one of Apurv’s friends (Sarthak) was also going to join us at Delhi Airport, so we waited for him. Then we all completed the security checks and started waiting for the boarding!
Our flight was on time and the boarding started at the correct time. After 2–3 hours of sleep and some food on the flight, we finally reached Munich Airport at around 4:30 AM. While we were waiting for our luggage to arrive, we found two more mentors from India who were going to attend the summit. All five of us left the airport together and took a bus to the hotel. The bus ride was around a half an hour journey, and it gave us a short glimpse of autumn in Munich and an amazing sunrise view.
After freshening up, we learned that day 1 was mostly planned as a day to relax and wait for others to join. We had our breakfast and met lots of folks from different organizations.
(Sandeep) Day 2: October 18
The “Friday Fun Day” was mostly planned for mentors to explore the city. We had the option to go on a tour to explore Germany’s Nymphenburg Castle, participate in a scavenger hunt with other attendees, or enjoy the day on our own. I was looking forward to the Nymphenburg Castle’s guided tour, so I scheduled to attend it at around 1 PM.
(Apurv) Day 3: October 19
The schedule for this day was quite packed with two lightning talk sessions — one in the morning, post-breakfast and another in the evening, post-dinner. There were also a number of informal sessions (unconferences) organized by mentors from various organizations and a photo scheduled in the afternoon.
In the first lightning talk session, each speaker was given at most 3 minutes to talk about one of the most important GSoC ’19 projects for their organization. The talk had to be interesting and fun without too much text. In order to stay on-time, after the allotted 3 minutes, the audience was asked to clap loudly so that the speaker eventually stops and leaves the stage (sounds fun but isn’t if you’re speaking!). We decided to showcase Shiqi’s GSoC project, Review Tests and Skill Mastery.
Here’s a glimpse of our talk:
Link to the slides: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xSfuLjnPAgIQL8UwzJ02N7vJUC7WBkC52ivodt8gAyI
(Fun fact: We had completed the slides a night before the event with all the speaker notes. On D-Day, we came to know that the slides were not being presented in the Presenter Mode. Therefore, we had to speak impromptu without the notes!)
From 11 AM onwards, we attended more informal sessions.
Here’s the session schedule:
I attended the “Demystifying SRE” session organized by the Google Munich team, and my takeaways from the session were:
- Rollback first, investigate later.
- Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
- Focus should be on scalability, reliability and efficiency.
- Achieve optimal automation.
- 100% is the wrong reliability for basically everything.
Afterwards, we had a group photo:
The day ended with another round of lightning talks and dinner and desserts:
Day 4: October 20
The closing session was scheduled today in the afternoon. Unfortunately, we had our flight at 12 PM and therefore, left early in the morning post breakfast.
Overall, the whole weekend was incredible — we had lots of chocolates and met lots of interesting people from around the world. All of the discussions related to open source projects and the GSoC programs were all quite informative and helpful. I hope this experience will help us to organize GSoC 2020 even better! Thanks to Google for organizing this event and bringing so many different people from around the world together!
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