My Journey of GSoC 2021: Onboarding to SCoRe Lab
I am Sachin Som, a 3rd-year electronics and communication engineering undergraduate. This year, I got my proposal selected for Google Summer of Code 2021 under the SCoRe Lab organization. Knowing little about open source to being selected as one of the students has been a great journey. I can’t express my gratitude towards the whole Score Lab Community for helping and welcoming new contributors.
Since I got the news that my proposal has been selected and I shared this info with people, I started getting some questions like what is open source and why I am fascinated towards the open-source contribution ?, In which org I contributed etc. So, this blog mainly focused on how I got selected for GSoC’21.
What is Open Source and Its benefits?
The idea of Open Source is that a community of users who need a solution can develop one cooperatively and share it freely. A contribution may take the form of direct effort(participation in development) or of resources or money for the development, testing, and or distribution of the solution and its source code.
The benefits of the contribution of open source are endless. It helps improve an individuals coding skills, teaches them about collaboration and gives them a chance to solve real-world problems. You get to be part of a diverse community willing to help you, and you get to choose what you want to work on! The best and the most important thing that should drive you towards contributing to open source is the idea of building a unified community.
Contributing to SCoRe Lab
I started contributing to SCoRe Lab in February 2021, so it was challenging for me to solve any issue. I wasn’t aware of the codebase, which was really large, but gradually I started to understand the codebase piece by piece. On the other hand, the whole SCoRe Lab was way helpful. Those challenges helped me to put in my skills upfront. By the end of March, I resolved around 5–6 issues, which helped me become a contributor at SCoRe Lab. Afterwards, l really liked contributing to it, and I continuously found issues and raised PRs for them. And the feeling that my code will be a part of this large codebase boosted my confidence.
Applying for Google Summer of Code
In March, the google summer of code organization's list was out, and yeah, SCoRe Lab was also participating in it.
After discovering SCoRe Lab on the list, I instantly started gazing around all SCoRe Lab’s projects, ideas, gitter discussions. Soon, I decided to contribute to the “Webiu” and “OpenMF” project, as they are very much suited according to my tech stack. Firstly, I started contributing to “Webiu” to improve the component functionality and add more components. Then, I started contributing to “openMF”. I majorly contributed to its flask backend, created some changes to its API list, and created some restful APIs.
After raising some pull request over these repositories, some of them got merged. This exponentially amplified and boosted me and I kept on contributed more. I also took help from fellow contributors. There was a healthy race between contributors for merging their PRs. Then, after preparing a project proposal and I applied for Google summer of code 2021.
And Finally, I got the proposal acceptance mail from Google summer of code on 17 May at 11:13 P.M.,
Congratulations, your proposal with SCoRe Lab has been accepted!
I literally couldn’t sleep that night because of the excitement. I got so many messages from my friends, relatives, they all congratulated me. After that, when I uploaded my result on LinkedIn, there were tones of comments and likes on that post. So yeah, that’s how my journey begins.
References and Links:
SCoRe Lab Website: https://scorelab.org/
Accepted GSoC proposal: OpenMF_project_proposal
GitHub Link: https://github.com/sachinsom93
Thanks for reading this article! Leave a comment below if you have any questions.
