All about Google Summer of Code(GSoC)

Hey Guys, I'm Akshat Jain Btech undergraduate from JECRC College Jaipur in IT Branch. I'm contributing to Opensuse Organization as a part of GSoC'22.

Q. What is open source software (OSS)?

Ans. Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance.

"Source code" is the part of the software that most computer users don't ever see; it's the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software—a "program" or "application"—works. Programmers who have access to a computer program's source code can improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don't always work correctly.

You can read more about it here - Open Source

Q. What is GSoC'22?

Ans. GSoC is one of the prestigious open-source programs in which open-source enthusiasts like us contribute to organizations listed in GSoC organization lists.

Q. How do we know if the organization we are currently working with going to be listed in GSoC or not?

Ans. It's quite simple you just have to be in touch with maintainers of that organization via any medium like (IRC, Slack, community groups, Discord, github, etc.) and you can ask their maintainers what's their plan for upcoming GSoC, or if you are new to opensource you can directly choose your organization from GSoC previous year organizations and start contributing to them because most of the organization repeatedly took part in GSoC.

Q. How are we gonna able to handle large codebases?

Ans. You, don't have to understand large codebases just focus on issues part of any software on Github. If you have any issues that click on your mind or you have an idea on how to solve that issue go ahead and ask the maintainer to elaborate on the issue. He'll provide you with that in which part of code this issue is happening and after that focus only on that part of the codebase.

Q. When did you start preparing for GSoC?

Ans. So in my IV semester. I was like I know technologies but I'm not able to get that feel from campus as they all are not aware of what I do and want to do. My tech stack is completely different from others so I and my friend Asif started contributing to open source in our particular domain. He contributed to ArduPilot in the embedded systems field and I contributed to OpenSUSE as I'm interested in Linux OS also but don't know how to contribute so started working on their typos. Then I was fortunate that OpenSUSE listed their product Rancher (k8s managing and monitoring tool) and decided to go further with this project. After knowing that I will be going with this project I study about Rancher and implemented it on small scale using its documentation after that when I came to know that I was able to understand their product I applied for GSoC'22 and the rest is all of you know. So as you can see dropping the hope and contributing to Linux and then again contributing to MLops covered a long zig-zag way by just doing what I did and keeping everything aside.

Q. I'm currently in my freshman year and don't know much about coding.

Ans. For this I would say yes you can, The first and foremost thing you have to do is learn the basics and follow the people who are already excelling in what you want to achieve, connect with them if they don't reply to you they made a community on discord and any other platform they have their community. The best part of open source is no technology remains untouched you will find someone in any domain. After doing the above things as a newbie to open-source Let's move with people who are now chosen in which technology they want to contribute. Make some projects using your knowledge, write blogs on what you did, and after that when you reached an intermediate level of that technology start taking issues on github. Start with GFI(Good first Issues) - You can find GFI here(finder.eddiehub.io/login)

Q. I'm not able to solve issues opensource is not for me.

Ans. It is overwhelming to start an open source but stick to it. The best part of open source is you will find friends in form of maintainers. They will help you in any way, they are more excited than you to help which I love about maintainers .

Q. Can I able to handle the project or issue assigned to me in GSoC or any other way?

Ans. It depends on you if you are really excited and flexible it's not as hard as you think. You have to just explore and implement. Believe in the process, not the outcome