I'm really excited to say that my project was selected for Google Summer of Code 2016! This is a really great opportunity for me to get to code throughout the summer, and coding is something I dearly love :D !
So this is how GSoC works. There are open source organizations who have a list of projects they want to see implemented, and they are willing to mentor enthusiastic people for it. GSoC provides a way for students all over the world to take up these projects, along with a stipend. As a student you are supposed to submit a proposal for whichever project you want to do to the respective org. Then you await the org mentors to review your proposal, compare it with countless other submissions and finally deem you worthy/unworthy of their mentorship :) .
I submitted my proposal to Kivy, a python framework to create UI apps for various platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi ( :O ! I was surprised too!) and obviously linux. You couldn't have imagined my excitement when I saw my name (actually my nick) and my project show up on Python Software Foundation's projects list.
My project is to implement a module for Tiled maps in Kivy's game engine KivEnt. Jacob Kovak, Mathieu Vibrel and Akshay Arora will be mentoring me. I've always wanted to work on game engines which makes this project all the more fascinating for me!
A bunch of seniors in my college have done GSoC in the past years, and they all had the same advice to give: Start contributing to the org you like, it gives you a much better chance of getting selected. So I started contributing to Kivy sometime in the winter last year. It was pretty tough at first, dealing with such a huge codebase. But the people who maintain kivy are really helpful with the tiniest of things. And they are extremely appreciative of the contributions you make too :D! I remember one of them commenting "Beautiful!" on one of my PRs before merging it, which left me wondering what was so great in this teensy contribution. But it did have a positive impact on me. For a beginner, positive feedback never hurts ;)!
I have come quite ahead from that beginning stage. I even earned a bounty on one of the bugs I fixed for kivy :D! The experience has been awesome. I'm getting to know this wonderful community of people who work towards kivy's development and I feel glad I am starting to be a part of that community! And I believe there much more great times ahead!
Well, GSoC requires me to blog about the developments of my project. It will help my mentors review my progress. So I will be using this blog to post updates and developments! Stay tuned :D!