Getting selected for GSoC’ 2019
Getting selected for Google Summer of Code-2019
This short blog post describes the journey of getting selected for Google Summer of Code, under SunPy organization, for 2019.
What is Google Summer of Code?
According to the sources -
Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.
For undergraduates students like us, GSoC serves as an exciting and eventful opportunity to write software, for real-world organizations, which provides the participants to write and learn the different aspects of real-world programming.
Events building up to GSoC’ 19
Roughly, I started to prepare my case for GSoC, by choosing organizations. The organization list is generally out by February, but many organizations, who have taken part in GSoC earlier, take part the current year also. I started to prune down my choices, and based on my interest, I chose SunPy. Since I was really fascinated with Physics, and the astronomical side of SunPy, I was quite keen to contribute to SunPy.
Working through PRs and Issues
GSoC provides a really good platform to sharpen and develop skills for building Open Sourced software. While the codebase for SunPy is present in GitHub, it was easy for me to understand and get through the process of solving issues/bugs and making a Pull Request. I started to solve the issues and PRs for SunPy around from January, so this provided me ample time to go through the probable projects and the code base that I would work later on. Reading codebase requires another skill, the ability to read through long scripts, understanding the flow of code and understanding the different witch-craft done in the codebase, and learning about them, which is what that makes up the important skill for making contributions.
Making a Proposal
After working through the issues and bugs, I started looking through the project ideas listed, and based on my interest, I chose NDCube. I started working on some issues of NDCube, after going through the project ideas, I chose Supporting APE14 for NDCube. This was quite fascinating, as it used an N-Dimensional cubical data structure for storing and manipulating astronomical data.
Getting selected for GSoC’ 19
Even though I had a very good conversation with my mentor and the SunPy project leads, I was still quite nervous during the result day. I was watching some movies to tone out my anxiety. The moment I got my result, I was really happy and was quite relieved.
Now the upcoming months is something, which I look forward to, as it remains one of my challenging months for Summers.
I have written a blog post of my first video-chat with my mentor, so stay tuned for another blog post of my conversation.
By the way, my mentors for the project are Stuart Mumford and Daniel Ryan.
