On 6th May I received the above mail but my participation was already confirmed because the result was announced on 4th May. Google had to resend all the mails because they got the name of organizations wrong on most of the acceptance letters they sent on 4th May😅. Going forward I am assuming you guys know about GSoC. If you don’t check this out.

My Technical Background and Last Year’s Failure

Before I got selected for GSoC’20 I had done an internship at AcadView(now upGrad) as a Python Subject Matter Expert (which is a kind of TA) in summer 2018. In 2019 I was working on a circuit simulator project for my computer graphics class and I was a little active in open source. This is when one of my friends told me about CircuitVerse. It is an online platform to save, share and simulate circuits. I didn’t have any idea about the technology stack that circuitverse was using back then(I was a newb to RoR), but I consider myself a fast learner so I started to try to contribute to it. I made around 11 PR’s and became the second-highest contributor in the organization(apart from the admin and mentors). One of my PR’s was adding Tagging functionality to the website and one other PR was around 20k line. Sadly I wasn’t able to give enough time for the proposal and the proposal I ended up submitting was weak, also the top contributor (with approximately 50 PR’s) also applied for the same project and got selected.

Pre GSoC’20

This year I was motivated to give my best. I spent most of my last year working with RoR(Ruby on Rails) and I also mentored at Google Code-In at CircuitVerse(and helped students with RoR doubts). But when the initial project list was announced I was in for a shock, There was only one project that was going to use RoR which closely dealt with the UI/UX of the website and 3 JS projects which were related to how the simulator worked. I always considered myself more of a backend developer so it was a setback for me. Also, I spent most of my college life trying to avoid JS. But the only way for me to avoid UI/UX development at that point was to work on one of the JS projects. So I decided to write my proposal for project idea 2 on the list an Electron App for Circuitverse. Later the project was modified. Refactoring, updating, and adding tests for the current JS code was added to the project description. It was a nightmare for me because the only reason I always tried to avoid JS was that how fast the whole code can get outdated and the standards change in JS, but thankfully a new I18n project was also added to the list later. I consulted some of my friends who were good at JS and decided that I would apply for both the projects. In the end, I was able to write a good proposal for Refactoring simulator code and Developing Desktop App I was hopeful that it would be good enough and I guess it was because I got selected 😄 .

Community Bonding Period

So, now that I am in GSoC, I am excited to start my work I have talked to my mentor who is very helpful and is the admin of the organization. I will be staring with my work a bit sooner because of the uncertainties caused by the whole COVID-19. I will keep you guys updated. Thank You for reading this it was longer then I expected it to be.