My journey to GSoC 2019
I finally made it! I am a Gsocer now🔥.
I’m Lakshya, full stack web developer and a computer science student and I have been working in open source for more than 3 months.
I got my attention to Google Summer Of Code during May 2018 when a friend told me about it, though I found it confusing at the beginning, I started gaining interest in open source and GSoC in October during Hacktoberfest 2018.
In December 2018, I started looking for the beginner-friendly organizations and found Public Labs so I contributed over their community-toolbox project and it motivated me a lot.
A minor contribution gave a boost start to my journey, and I started learning new technologies and looking for more organizations. The beauty of open source made me fall in love with it, that you people around the globe work over an idea, such an environment fascinated me so much.
And then, during January 2019, I was told about an uprising organization from my senior friend/mentor known as Codeuino, led by a group of great mentors.
At first, my initial contribution was of adding 3 buttons using HTML and CSS for their login, and as it was a new organization so they were not so much crowd, so I got enough space to learn the codebase and start working on it.
The project (Donut) at that moment was purely on NodeJS and EJS, so contributing to the project boosted up my NodeJS skills and made me a better backend web developer.
The only thing I kept in mind while contributing to the project to keep my code quality, number of quality commits and frequency of community interactions to be high. Secondly, one has to be patient during this phase as students come up with many ideas and we have to listen to them, even if we don’t like it.
You may find criticism but at the end, the only thing matter is “CODE”.
So, Codeuino’s project “ Development of UI/UX Modules For Donut”, got my attention and I started working on the ideas on the same.
The organization wanted to migrate their project to VueJs. So I started learning it, it was so overwhelming at first but later I found a helpful video, seriously a single YouTube tutorial made me so comfortable with Vue, it was from freeCodeCamp and Gwendolyn Faraday. I’m so thankful to them, their Vuejs tutorial changed my life and got me to this platform.
So the application submission phase was kind of frustrating for me, as spending whole nights on the proposal and next day mentors didn’t like it. So with the help of my best friend ❤(Thank you :’) ) and my mentors, I bought up new ideas for the organization and added them into my proposal keeping the content neat as much as possible, I made 20 pages of one neat proposal for GSoC, and I got selected for it. Even though my competition was so tough but my mentors choose me.
So, here it was Phase 1 of my GSoC journey, hope you find it a little bit interesting, and keep in mind,
- Keep the proposal really *FORMAL*, keep the font-size and color as consistent as possible.
- Draw all the ideas in points, so it won’t be boring enough.
- Keep looking over previous GSoC proposal, for inspirations.
- And having reviews from mentors is really crucial, I mean really!
- Have a best friend to help and motivate you always.
- Keep learning, it will pay off!
That’s it, I’m really thankful to my mentors and everyone who believed in me.
Wish me luck, so I can write a success story of GSoC :P.
