I will be honest, I did not want to set up this blog, because I am not good with writing down my thoughts. I will most probably try to come up with funny, sarcastic remarks and miserably fail at it. Or maybe everyone else fails to get my sense of humour. The only reason that I set up this blog is that I have been accepted in Google Summer of Code 2019 at coala and was told that it is necessary to write blog posts. The $3000 does provide a little motivation to write, but I am pretty sure this will be turn out to be more bothersome that actual coding.
So anyways, let me start with my blog. I got to know about Google Summer of Code almost about one year ago when a student from my university Ishan Srivastava got selected into GSoC 2018 with coala. At that time I heard Google and thought “woah this seems 🔥”, but never actually tried to find out what is actually was because I was busy doing nothing. Then around November 2018, seeing a couple of my friends, out of sheer boredom I started contributing to coala. At the beginning trying to fix my commit message was not fun, but as soon as I picked up my first real issue I started enjoying the whole process. Just the thought of people sitting in different parts of the world working together on building something is unbelievable.
But I was soon left frustrated because there was much to change to solve that issue and John Vandenberg who is a maintainer of coala and was helping me solve this issue went MIA. I think he has not been active since a couple of months now and suddenly all the development in coala slowed down. At this point, I thought about not applying for GSoC and maybe doing an internship but just the thought of developing a website from some startup makes me nauseous.
One week before proposals were being submitted, I started working on my proposal, but the mentors for both of the projects I was interested were not active 😓. Then I got in touch with Mischa Krüger, who helped me throughout until the deadline. Honestly, without him, I don’t think my proposal would have been accepted.
Now that my proposal has been accepted I hope these 3 months are amazing. Also being active in open source community these few months has made me appreciate FOSS, and I have realized that getting accepted GSoC is cool not because of “Google” but because of contributing to open source is cool and everyone should try it.
