GSoC
Google Summer of Code
Presentation by Karan Palan
Presentation Overview
- About me and my experiences (Pre-GSoC and Post GSoC)
- What is Open source and basic terminologies
- GSoC - The What, Why and How - Overview
- How to find Organizations?
- How to contribute?
- How to write Proposal?
- Ad-hoc
- Questions
My Journey till now
2023
- JEE, Boards ~70%, Uncertainty with Career
- Explore Diff. Online Business models, explore different career options, find out Tech to be the best one
- Brute force Tech YouTube, find Kunal Kushwaha
- Feel relatable, get hope, start coding ~Aug 23'
- 2 courses, 2hr/day each - Web dev + Python
- Hacktoberfest in October (Intro to OS contribution)
- Participate in 2 Hackathons, no results
- Complete 40% of Python course, complete Web dev course, explore ML for for Imagine Cup, Electron Js
- Start Harkirat's Cohort in Dec
- 3-4 small in-code documentation PRs merged for GSoC
My Journey till now
2024
- First Hackathon win - LNM Hacks 6.0 (AEternity)
- Attend meetings, get in touch with mentors, 4 more small PRs merged, Imagine cup till round 3
- Learn Eth Stack - curiosity and hackathons
- 2nd Hackathon win - IITD Tryst (Solidity)
- 3rd Hackathon win - IEEE MUJ (Gen Ai)
- Cohort ~10 weeks, Selected in GSoC 24' @Sugarlabs
- May-Sep: GSoC Project, Cohort ~18 weeks, 4th Hackathon win - Mantra Chain
- Paid Ads, Trading, More focus on health, recover Acads
- Get an offer ~Oct end (Blockchain, stealth)
- 5th Hackathon win - GDSC MUJ (Aptos)
My Journey till now
2025
- Attend another Hackathon (Aptos, Educhain)
- Contribute to other OS projects (dev tooling to cloud)
What I'm doing and plan to do:
- Core - DSA, OS, DBMS, OOP, CN etc. with real world projects and questions
- Solid Projects - Web+DevOps, Blockchain, Gen Ai
- Launch a product + market it
- More Open source, ownership, chromium contributions
Note - Everyone has a different path, create your own, and set your own timeline
What is Open source?
Open source refers to software projects where the source code is made publicly available. This means anyone can view, use, modify, and distribute the code, provided they follow the licensing terms.
Addressing the Elephant in the room,
What is Google Summer of Code (GSoC)?
An initiative by Google to increase OSS engagement
- Organizations Apply with Project Ideas
- Students Apply with proposals
- Mentorship and Coding Period
- Mid-term and Final Evaluation
How it works?
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 now
- 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
- Be highly skilled, focus heavily on your learning
- Do your own research, do not ask for handouts
- Ask meaningful qns to Mentors/Past mentee's
- Be helpful and ask questions/do discussions publically
Dont's
- Create PR without having any idea of that the code is doing or fix simple typos or docs
- Not read community/contributing guidelines
- Ping maintainers for unwanted reasons
- 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!
To Sahaj Jain and the Cyborgs Team for inviting me, and the amazing audience