I have got selected in GSoC program to contribute to the Ruby organisation. Gsoc is a summer internship only for students. It is an initiative started and sponsored by Google to get more developers to contribute to open-source. If selected to participate in GSoC, one has to complete an open-source project within a duration of around 4 months. There are many organisations that are available to choose from in different categories based on your interest.
Steps to participate in gsoc:
- Select an organisation or multiple (your wish)
- View their idea list (you can also come up with your own idea also)
- Choose a project which you like to work on
- Contact the mentor to understand more about the project and handle any queries
- Write and submit a draft of how you plan to solve the project with timeline breakdowns
- While waiting for that result try to start contributing to the organisation
Below is the story of how I got into GSoC (only read if you are too bored):
I had looking into GSoC last year and was too late to try and apply. I did however find a good project and email the mentor about that project but with no luck. So then I thought I’ll apply next year. With other things were happening in my life I totally forgot about it. Three days before the final day to submit a draft for GSoC this year my friend happened to mention that he was trying to participate. I felt really bad that I didn’t look at it sooner and thought that I was not going to be able to participate this year as well.
I just glanced at organisations that I thought I could participate in and found so many that had many interesting projects. I decided to go with ruby because I know that language the most and had used rails a little before.
The lucky thing happened when I was trying to contact the mentor for some project. I didn’t know how to contact them on bundler slack so I put up a message saying I was interested in participating in GSoC for so and so project and would like to talk to the mentor. Since I was short on time I decided to send personal messages (which I later learnt is not a good practice) to members who were frequently replying to other questions. Although I did end by finding the mentor, I ended up talking to another mentor( who I thought was a participant). As soon as I found out he was a mentor I asked him what projects he was overseeing. He suggested that I look into this project idea.
The project seemed very interesting and I became a little confident that I’ll be able to finish it as it had ruby and rails. I immediately started writing a draft on how I was planning to solve the project. My next blog will probably be the draft I submitted. Anyways, I submitted it and got selected for participating in 2019 GSoC. A very happy moment in my life.
P.S - Contribute to open-source even if you don't get through