Introduction
Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to students who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer.
The process is quite simple, you browse organisations and select the ones that you want to work with. You join their community channels (slack, irc, gitter, mailing lists, etc), introduce yourself, work on some stuff, solve bugs or issues, make pull requests and when the time comes, send your proposal for the project you want to work on, and until the result arrives, you get familiar with the codebase of the project related repository.
How I did it
I had filtered the organizations by language and domain. I was looking for projects in Python, R, Machine Learning and Data Science. I had shortlisted a few organizations, namely Synfig, UC OSPO, C2SI, and the Wikimedia Foundation. I was now filtering through them one by one, interacting with mentors and getting familiar with the projects. However, I felt like I wasn’t making any progress overall. I was on the search again and now I had found Internet Archive and IOOS. The mentors over at IOOS were really supportive and interactive. I knew little of this project but I learnt a lot over time. This sealed the deal and IOOS was the only organization I had applied to.
Writing the Proposal
I had gone through previous proposals at IOOS and other organizations as well for inspiration. Try to be concise and honest about your preferences, schedule, availability and experiences in your proposal. I had made a draft and got my mentors to review it. After a lot of good suggestions, it was finally ready. View it here - PDF
My proposal format -
- Abstract
- Why this project?
- Technical Details
- References
- Development Experience
- Schedule
- Additional Background
- Appendix
Results
The results were out on May 2nd and my proposal to IOOS got accepted!
Here is my acceptance letter.
Here is my project description.