Hola Todos! This blog is intended to serve as a guide to your journey in Google Summer of Code. So let’s get into it without wasting any time :)

What is GSoC? — Its prerequisites and benefits

Google Summer of Code is sometimes termed as GSoC in short form. It is an Open-source software development program by Google involving multiple selected open-source organizations. Now, in the last sentence, I used the term ‘Open-source’ quite a few times. Well, this is one of your prerequisites you would like to know before doing GSoC. You need to know the open-source community of the organization you are applying for, it’s admins and project contributors, talk with them regularly and try to develop healthy contributor relations wherein they can trust you while selecting your application for GSoC. Your next prerequisite would be to learn Git and GitHub basics as you will be heavily relying on its functionalities and features while contributing code to your project. I will attach some resources towards the end of the blog.

Well, these prerequisites mentioned are all in the assumption that you have a tech stack/domain sorted out and you know how to work with that. Well, I have heard some misconceptions due to the name of the program that the former is dependent on coding and solving competitive coding problems. It is not!! Herein, you need to develop actual products and software with your code.

Talking about the benefits, you get to learn a lot: enhance your own domain skills, learn product development, managing a large codebase, build your portfolio, learning from community members and fellow contributors since Open Source is ❤️. Other than that, of course, if you pass the program successfully, you get an official certificate, recommendation letter and swags 👕 😎.

Get Selected 🚀

Well, in my opinion, getting selected is mainly based on the relations you have with the organization admins and mentors. Your proposal and idea quality is the second factor. Well, I have seen students and developers getting confused about what steps they should follow in what order and what should be the plan ahead. Well, I have formulated some short and crisp steps for you :)

Step1: Choose your organization beforehand based on the past performance of selected organizations

Make a calculative guess beforehand and choose an organization. Look at it's projects which suits your domain.

Step 2: Start contributing to projects early and contribute as much as possible (Around December)

Make Pull requests to already open issues in the project repo. Open new issues which you find in the project after discussing with mentors and other contributors.

Step 3: Conversate with mentors, admins and fellow contributors about issues in the project and further ideas for the project

Step 4: Write your proposal crisp, innovative and clear. Give screen designs and mockups of the product you envision in your proposal. You can choose ideas from the ideas list of the organization or propose your own

Step 5: Don’t stop!!! Keep contributing and help other contributors in the community even after submitting your application. YOU ARE BEING WATCHED!

Now that you have done the above steps, keep your fingers crossed and wait for the results patiently. And believe my words, more often than not you will get selected 😉. Here is my GSoC’19 work product summary with FOSSASIA: https://gist.github.com/jddeep/f577efa04baea912a44605fbbf7d8d91

Well, that’s all in this blog. I have tried to keep this blog as short as possible, to the point, crisp and helpful for all of you.

Resources:

1. https://www.udacity.com/course/version-control-with-git--ud123
2. https://blog.udacity.com/2015/06/a-beginners-git-github-tutorial.html

Thanks for your time. See you guys later 👋 👋