GSoC

Google Summer of Code

Presentation by Karan Palan

Presentation Overview

  1. How to find Organizations?
  2. How to contribute?
  3. How to write Proposal?
  4. Ad-hoc
  5. Questions

GSoC Blueprint

Be decent in one tech stack of your choice

Find Projects to contribute
i.e Search for Organizations

Familiarize yourself with Git and Github,
Hacktoberfest can be a great start point

1. Active organization (make sure org is active year-long and not just during GSoC period) and past record
2. You are interested in contributing to that organization (getting into GSoC shouldn’t be your sole motivation, it can be, but usually not a good idea)
3. The project matches >30% of your tech stack (doesn’t matter, but relatively makes contributing easy as you’re familiar with stuff)

How to select Organizations ?

Contribute till Org announcement date

If org selected + ~5 PRs merged + Good reputation

Double down on contributions + focus on proposal

If org selected + ~2 PRs merged + okay chances

Double down on contributions + choose a relatively new org

If org not selected

Find new Organization, be aggressive with contributions

Plan for folks starting late

  • Similar to case 3 (org not selected by Google)
  • Pick relatively new organizations/easy projects
  • Find out projects where contributors got selected without contributions/very less contributions

No Good first issues, Pick issues are tough/no one else picks up/saves maintainers effort

How to write Proposal?

Mostly Organizations have their format, if they don't , make sure it contains these.

Regardless of contributions, completely make a high effort Proposal, refer this video.

Implement a portion of the project in the Proposal

My Proposal Walk-through

Do's

  1. Be highly skilled, focus heavily on your learning
  2. Do your own research, do not ask for handouts
  3. Ask meaningful qns to Mentors/Past mentee's
  4. Be helpful and ask questions/do discussions publically

Dont's

  1. Create PR without having any idea of that the code is doing or fix simple typos or docs
  2. Not read community/contributing guidelines
  3. Ping maintainers for unwanted reasons
  4. Unnecessary private conversations with mentors

Ad-hoc

  • Check every project of every organization (Some Perl/elixir based project might want to migrate front-end or some cpp based project wants to have it's landing page restyled
  • Be in touch with mentors (some have bi-weekly calls, some only communicate through chat depending on the Org)
  • Contributions will stay - so contribute irrespective of the outcome (much better than submitting assignments that won't get a reply back)

Any Questions?

Thank you!

GSoC JSON Schema

By Karan Palan

GSoC JSON Schema

  • 52