Getting into IIT and then GSoC, a dream come true moment
It all started with a dream…
colleges has never been easy, especially if you are in one of India's best and most competitive universities.
When the world was going through the post-war moments (Ukraine-Russia war), the corona was again catching up in many cities across India, and something incredible happened in my life.
I got selected for GSoC.
It was a dream come true. After my jee advanced result, I first heard about GSoC while exploring colleges. Each year, IIT Roorkee, my college, has broken its record in the number of students selected for GSoC.
The story goes back to my first semester. Full of confusion, worries, and corona, one of the best pieces of advice I got from my seniors was, "explore as much as you can while in 1st year." I took that advice seriously.
In the first year, I explored android development, competitive programming, stock trading, crypto, blockchain, and many other fields. I finally settled for web development.
HTML, CSS, and javascript, then react and then node, and that's how my full stack developer journey started.
And as soon as 2022 started, I began to chase my dream, my dream for GSoC. I went through all the organizations on the GSoC page more than 15 times to find the one that fits right to my interests and sounds fun. Then I came across Score Labs, one of the open-source organizations.
One of the projects that intrigued me was the Codelabz project. So I said I had found the right partner… for GSoC. I started to explore the codebase, and soon enough, I created my first issue and pr. It was fun.
Then came the phase where we needed to write the proposal. I suck at that. So I took help from my seniors, the internet, the previous year's GSoCers, and basically anyone I knew. And soon enough, I submitted my first proposal.
After getting feedback from the mentor, I changed many parts of my proposal. The deadline for final submission was the 19th of April 2022, 11:30 pm IST. I submitted my final draft at around 11'o clock on the same day.
And then, I kept exploring the codebase.
And then the final day came for which I was waiting deadly—the 20th of May when the results were announced.
I eagerly awaited results, with very little hope since the competition was too harsh. I did not receive any mail. It was past 1:00 am IST, 2 hours past the result announcement time. 3 of my college mates have received the mail of getting selected, college WhatsApp group started to flooded with cheer-up and congratulations messages. At that point, I began to believe I couldn't make it. But since I also hadn't received the rejection mail, there was still some hope.
At 3'o clock, one of the other contributors informed me that I could see the result on the GSoC website and that I had been selected. I quickly opened the link, and voila, it was there. My name for GSoC contributor 2022. in total, six contributors gt selected for the Codelabz project, and I was fortunate enough to be one of them. Overall around 1200 people made it to GSoC this year out of 4000 who applied.
There was no end to my happiness. I have finally become GSoCer.
Week-0: Community Bonding Period
During week 0, I got the chance to interact with other contributors more and more. We all agreed to create an unofficial WhatsApp group to have informal and resistance-free conversations. I went through the opened prs to see which one we can close as asked by mentors. since we are upgrading the UI, and most of the prs were related to UI only, we can close all opened prs. I also went through the opened issues, again, many of them are associated with UI, and we can close those issues. I had google meet with my mentor, and we discussed how to improve the code editor we are using in our platform.
That's all for my first blog. I am gonna write weekly blogs on medium about my GSoC journey.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn, always open to new connections and friends.
See you in the next blog.
and yeah, if I were to advise you about getting into GSoC, I would say
- start early
- start with the project that interests you, not the one someone recommended to you
- keep in touch with mentors, ping them on Linkedin, Twitter, or any platform you can
- indulge with the community more and more
- and most importantly, never lose hope.
