A new expedition awaits — GSoC ‘21
My joy knows no bound, being a participant of Google Summer of Code ’21 is a definite milestone. I’m on the precipice of my fortune and I bet my chips at CHAOSS community during this summers on the project idea “Automate Metrics Release and Process Improvement”.
Project Abstract
Improving the metric release process and fully automating will not only save time, but it will also help us to define a central structure for the current as well as upcoming WGs/metrics. Keeping in mind the ever evolving CHAOSS, the process would be scalable and flexible enough for easy tweaking in future. The quality and the impression of the PDF would also be on equal priority.
My Mentors
This was my second attempt at GSoC (unofficially). I was aware about this in my first year but wasn’t prepared and skilled enough, I was still learning. In my second year I gave it a shot, but couldn’t make it. Later I figured it was because of poor interaction from my side. I wasn’t active or involved with the community at all. I just did the microtasks and was waiting for the results. (PS. I didn’t submit any official proposal since THAT org would select participant beforehand and only that person would write the proposal, so officially, on paper I made to GSoC in my 1st attempt :D)
This time around, I decided to select CHAOSS as the organization to which I would apply, a colleague of mine, Ria Gupta participated in this org last year as a GSoC student. She was pretty helpful as an advisor. So I waited till mid march when the project ideas were out. I had no clue to select which one, most of them were centered around the Grimoirelab and the Augur project. Then I saw one on creating automatic PDFs from the markdowns. Although I had no experience of converting markdowns to PDFs, but I had a fresh knowledge of LaTeX due to my B.Tech thesis project. The idea of automation seemed doable to me (automation is the perfect word for a lazy sack like me).
So I started to sticking around with the org, tried to understand the Working Groups and how the manual task for metrics release was being done till now. Then I started attending their weekly meetings, it was very hard at first (me being a socially awkward guy, with poor comm skills), but after 3–4 meetings, I became pretty comfortable with org, was able to connect and discuss various things. Since my microtasks ended a bit too soon, I tried to contribute to other areas as well and kept attending the meeting. Even after submitting the proposal I was still active in the community and contributed where ever I could.
On the day of result, I was becoming very nervous and anxious, I knew the result would be out at 11:30 PM IST, so to distract myself I put on a movie (Pulp Fiction!). The result came out a bit early, (15 minutes early) and I was overwhelmed with joy!
So I will working on this idea with Yash Prakash, we both were selected for the same idea. I’m really excited for this new journey and hoping for a memorable experience!
I would like to thank Ria Gupta, Venu Vardhan Reddy Tekula & Ujjwal Makin and for their constant support and guidance through this process. I would also like to thank
“Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about” — Winston Churchill
Some useful links:
