Summer Coding with Rocket.Chat — #0 | Before the Summer

TL;DR

All’s Well That Ends Well –William Shakespeare

However, this is just the beginning 😊.

Back in March 2017. I discovered the Google Summer of Code, It is a program sponsored by Google, focused on bringing student developers into open source software development. Where students work with an open source organization on a 3-month programming project during their break from school.

And, I decided to apply. As it was my final year in college and Google only allowed students to participate, It was my last chance to apply for GSoC. I went through various projects from great Opensource Organizations like Mozilla, Python, Apache and every Opensource Organization you can think of, a plethora of exciting projects you can imagine of. There I found out the project that was a perfect fit for me — Making A Progressive Web App Client for Rocket.Chat. and I applied.

The only thing you need to do to apply for GSoC is to submit a proposal for the project you want to make. Making a project proposal, itself was a great experience for me. I met my awesome mentor, Karl Prieb, who is FrontEnd Developer @Rocket.Chat, A very helpful and supportive guy. We discussed on how I should be planning my project, what features I should add to the project and lots of things, to make my proposal awesome. Eventually, I wrote a proposal (here is the Original Proposal I had submitted for GSoC), I went through the process and applied for GSoC’17.

Then It was a long time waiting for the results to be declared. And then it was May 3rd, 2017, The day Google was declaring the results. At 9:00 P.M. IST, results were out. I didn’t make it 😞

The Turning Point

I moved on (It was only because of my friends, who helped me move on, and I am very grateful to them 😄) from not getting selected into GSoC, thinking at least I learned something from it, making an Awesome Proposal with an Awesome Mentor. Then, it was all again daily chores, University stuff and finishing up exams and goofing around.

I decided to write something on my blog, on June 1st, 2017, I published a blog post on this blog on Progressive Web Apps, thinking it was worth sharing my experience of what I had learned about PWA’s during this process. I shared the post on social media. And then there was that #turningpoint

Reading my tweet about the blog post, Karl Prieb, my Mentor from Rocket.Chat, messaged me on Twitter. Asking where I had been lost for the month after the results. And that they tried to contact me. That even though, I was not selected for GSoC’17, Rocket.Chat wanted me to work on the Project. I was very much surprised, to hear that. Continuing the talk, he said that they had announced this the very next day after the GSoC results and that I didn’t respond to any of the communication (I had laid off all the communications on Rocket.Chat’s server after the GSoC results, and went on with my daily life.). They had even written on their blog, that one of the students didn’t respond to us 😅.

I requested Karl, to let me in to pursue the project, He asked his higher ups and then I was in. Thanks to Karl and Rocket.Chat’s Members who understood my mistake and let me in. Now, it has been almost a Month since then. And now I am working on the Rocket.Chat’s Progressive Web App in ReactJS.

Thus, my journey begins with Rocket.Chat with their Summer of Code. It is fun being a Contributor at Rocket.Chat, where everyone is so helpful and always trying to write the best code, learning new things.

Since this post is getting too long, I’ll share my Coding Experience in later posts. That’s why I made this the post #0. As this is the point where the actual journey begins.

Originally posted at Otaku.Codes