The pre-GSoC journey

Greetings!

It was the 4th of May, and the results were to be announced at 11:30 pm (IST). I was sitting with my fingers crossed, trying to do some work, but my eyeballs were rolling back again and again to the clock to confirm the time ........

PRE-GSoC PERIOD

Oh! Sorry for the change in the paragraph, but let me first take you to my pre-GSoC period to give you a complete insight. I was pretty excited to take part in GSoC just after the completion of my first year. Till then, I was involved in Android and Web development and had worked upon a few projects, and being a developer, Git and Github were in my daily use. I must say this first, that if you want to be an open-source developer, Git and GitHub are something which you must get familiar with at the very beginning. So I got familiar with a few programming languages by that time, and also with JSON and XML, which are the major data exchange format on the web (JSON mainly). During this one year, I was really impressed by the field of Computer Science, often wondering how humans have turned these machines to something which can do some really big stuff in a few seconds, connect us to any corner of the world, interpret the world around, and can make their own decisions. It then often made me think about how complex the internal structure of humans themselves would be if they is capable of doing all these kinds of stuff. So I was curious to dig deeper into the internal structure of humans and this is where I felt to look after a biology-based organization. I came across NRNB, an umbrella organization with many different tools under it, in different programming languages. I looked at its project and found a few which were appropriate for me on the basis of my knowledge and skills, and when I finalized one, I did what every other student was doing, i.e., wrote on the issue "Hey, this project looks good to me, is it open for GSoC 2020? Can I work on this?". The project was open and there was no other student working on that issue, so I finalized it, and then the series of sending and receiving mails with the mentors started.

The main site of NRNB says "we take mentoring seriously" and I completely agree with them. My mentors Dr. Andreas Drager and Dr. Matthias Konig were awesome and very helpful. They helped me a lot while writing the proposal and to completely understand my project. They provided me with all the necessary resources and even shared past proposals, which helped me a lot to further write my own proposal. They even helped me to write my own proposal, constantly improving it until we reached a point where no further improvements were possible, and we completed it ten days before the deadline, thanks to them for their constant support. Meanwhile, I kept understanding the project more deeply, found a few issues to solve which were of my level at that time, sent two PR, and got both of them merged. This further boosted up my confidence and also helped me to better understand the COBRApy codebase. Finally, the date of submission arrived, I submitted the proposal and then the waiting period started. During this period, I kept on understanding my project more deeply, discussing implementation details of the project with the community, clearing my doubts, and hoping everything will go fine.

4th May, 11:00 pm

Finally, the one month wait was over, and though I was pretty confident that everything would go fine, there were chunks of doubts in my mind regarding if I could not make it. Well, I was prepared for that also and just hoped for the best. At 11:10 pm, I went out of the room to drink water, and when I returned, there was a notification on my phone. I knew it was from GSoC. I wished myself best of luck, unlocked the phone, and there it was


I congratulated myself for finally making it, and soon the congratulation emails of mentors followed. I thanked them for being such an invaluable and helpful mentors throughout the pre-GSoC period and we all were very happy to work with each other in the time to be followed.

Wish me best of luck for the journey.

Thanks.
Location: Rewari, Haryana, India

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