NOTE : THIS IS NOT YOUR "ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ACHIEVING GSoC GLORY" OR "HOW TO GET INTO GSoC FOR DUMMIES". ITS JUST A BLOG STATING MY EXPERIENCES AND CODE THAT WOULD GO IN THROUGHOUT THE SUMMERS SO YOU CAN KNOW WHAT OPEN-SOURCE IS ALL ABOUT.
So why GSoC in particular ? Its because I wanted to be close to my family and work on something which I love and I hate 9-5 jobs, summers are the best time to pursue and explore your passions. Plus you can register it as a Research-Internship for your 3-rd year, and you would also be paid hell a lot. So this was the best summer package.
I fell in love with Sympy - Symbolic python. Its a mathematical software like wolfram. I was interested in abstract mathematics. So I decided to work on "Implementing Group theory module in Sympy".
To be continued...
JAN 2015 - How it started
It wasn't a milestone for me. For many its a glory, lifetime achievement and a definitive goal. I had the same perspective towards GSoC when I was in my 2nd year but then perspectives changed. I gradually started to believe that creating value should be the goal and that process in itself is what gets me high. GSoC/internships/Code-in are merely names/paths to creating great value, they shouldn't be goals themselves !So why GSoC in particular ? Its because I wanted to be close to my family and work on something which I love and I hate 9-5 jobs, summers are the best time to pursue and explore your passions. Plus you can register it as a Research-Internship for your 3-rd year, and you would also be paid hell a lot. So this was the best summer package.
I fell in love with Sympy - Symbolic python. Its a mathematical software like wolfram. I was interested in abstract mathematics. So I decided to work on "Implementing Group theory module in Sympy".
FEB 2015 - What I wanted to do
I started contributing and made several naive PRs. It was a huge code base and required some time to get familiar with it. Moreover it covered concepts ranging from algebra to quantum mechanics. So it was quite a hard time.
Parallel to that I have been writing my own standalone group theory software which uses basic sympy elements to perform group theoretic functions.
Then I had a conversation with my potential mentor Aaron and also created a decent proposal. They seemed to love the idea and the chances of me getting in were quite good so I continued writing PRs and working on my proposal and the software simultaneously until the 20th when the selected organisations were announced. I realized that our organisation itself has not been selected this year.
This was quite a shock to everyone including the mentors. There was a panic in the mailing list and people bashing each other. Sympy has been a regular at GSoC for the past 3-4 years and under the python umbrella before that, taking about 10 students an year and this time Google bluntly rejected them.
On the other hand for me it was a really big disappointment for three reasons:
Parallel to that I have been writing my own standalone group theory software which uses basic sympy elements to perform group theoretic functions.
Then I had a conversation with my potential mentor Aaron and also created a decent proposal. They seemed to love the idea and the chances of me getting in were quite good so I continued writing PRs and working on my proposal and the software simultaneously until the 20th when the selected organisations were announced. I realized that our organisation itself has not been selected this year.
This was quite a shock to everyone including the mentors. There was a panic in the mailing list and people bashing each other. Sympy has been a regular at GSoC for the past 3-4 years and under the python umbrella before that, taking about 10 students an year and this time Google bluntly rejected them.
On the other hand for me it was a really big disappointment for three reasons:
- Because all the work/code/research I did till then got unnoticed and even if they get a few slots from other organisations somehow, I wouldn't be in because there were much more important improvements to be done than adding a whole new field of mathematics to it. So my project was quite a low priority.
- Also because if I'm not in, I'll have no other option except to rot in college during the summers under the name of research internship and I will have to ask my parents money "for working for someone else", there's no real product that I would be creating, just research and I din't feel good about it.
- I also can't ask Kishan Patel(who is my dearest friend and was my employer at playpower) to take me as an intern again because even he was struggling a lot with his startup and I din't want to burden him.
Things changed and what GSoC was for me, is not that anymore. I planned correctly, put in effort and did my part but I got fucked and it wasn't my fault this time. At this point I was as desperate as everyone else to make things right for the summer.
FEB 2015 - What I ended up doing
I quickly looked up the organisations involving python and found this organisation called TARDIS - Temperature And Radioactive Diffusion in Supernovae. Its quite a scary name, I know !
I really liked the software and its domain(astronomy). Its still in its initial stages, with cool nerds developing it having PhDs in physics. Seemed exiting to me.
I introduced myself in the mailing list and started getting familiar with the code base. It was relatively easy for me this time, very less code, less research(partly because I took up the testing project).
Since I was quite familiar with python and also the code base I have written a lot of good PRs this time lightning fast until my mentor had to ask me to stop
So I opened a new PR to resolve the C-tests issue but we were running into issues like this long thread and are still trying to figure things out. Feel free to think about it and comment there if you seem to find a better solution. I also found out that many attempts were made in the past but failed. I feel that the problem is with the setup files that were imported from astropy not playing well with our codebase, will look into that in the near future.
During this time I also wrote a good proposal which Wolfgang(my mentor) liked a lot and helped me out to finish it. After all this I have submitted my proposal on melange and just waited.
I really liked the software and its domain(astronomy). Its still in its initial stages, with cool nerds developing it having PhDs in physics. Seemed exiting to me.
I introduced myself in the mailing list and started getting familiar with the code base. It was relatively easy for me this time, very less code, less research(partly because I took up the testing project).
Since I was quite familiar with python and also the code base I have written a lot of good PRs this time lightning fast until my mentor had to ask me to stop
So I opened a new PR to resolve the C-tests issue but we were running into issues like this long thread and are still trying to figure things out. Feel free to think about it and comment there if you seem to find a better solution. I also found out that many attempts were made in the past but failed. I feel that the problem is with the setup files that were imported from astropy not playing well with our codebase, will look into that in the near future.
During this time I also wrote a good proposal which Wolfgang(my mentor) liked a lot and helped me out to finish it. After all this I have submitted my proposal on melange and just waited.
MARCH 2015 - What happened next
The mentors have rejected any further contact with the students until the result, None of us had any idea who was going to get selected. As time passed I started to get a feeling that there were other students/projects much more important to them plus its a small organisation so will get very few slots and I have a very less chance to get selected.
And during this period the Hackerrank(applied in december but din't get a call back) guys called me for an interview and I got selected there. This was quite a good turn and I stopped worrying about GSoC because irrespective of me getting selected or not, I can always contribute to TARDIS anytime and I know them well. I just wont get paid for it, and I was okay with it.
APRIL 2015 - Results
Until later when I was writing a mail to my dad and a mail pops in saying "Congratulations: You got selected for GSoC" and quickly opened the melange page. I was shocked and extremely happy at the same time.
Shocked because it was least expected and also realised that I was the only one of the 36 students who applied to get selected. The other two were somehow associated to TARDIS and weren't applicants per se.
MAY 2015(almost) - Now
What will follow now is a series of meetings and some prototyping(may be) until the coding period starts. I have one tomorrow and every Thursday. A typical agenda for a meeting looks like this:
To be continued...
