GSoC - A Global Program Enhancing Open Source Culture

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At 6pm UTC i.e. (11:30 pm in India), I received a mail from Google about my proposal that it has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2021 and I am going to be a part of it .

Yay!! I made into GSoC in my very first attempt at an early phase of my graduation. Being a sophomore, I took this as a career elevating opportunity and a platform for great learning experience along with exposure to the real coding world.

i18n-gsoc-cover

In this post, I will be discussing what exactly GSoC is and how the Open Source industry along with GSoC are helping students and engineers all around the world to bring out their true potential.

About GSOC and OPEN SOURCE

Open Source is "You are welcome to make our software better!"

Do you know, according to Wikipedia more than 180,000 Open Source Projects (Softwares) are already serving people throughout the world, thus Open Source Culture has yielded a tremendous growth in the Software Industry.

Yes!! Open Source welcomes all Developers, Undergraduate Students and Engineers to elevate their skills and gain a professional level software development experience in terms of contribution to the Open Source Software, documentation and anything that you can serve to make an Open Source Software better.

Recently, open source community has helped a very important mission known as NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter . This Ingenuity’s software used by NASA’s First Mars Helicopter were empowered by nearly 12,000 developers from all around the world via Open Source.

What is Google Summer of Code ?

The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated as 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 summer. This program is open to university students aged 18 and more.

GSoC is an initiative to serve open source culture and is administered by Google Main Headquarters since 2005. As of now, 16,000+ students from 111 countries worked with 715 open source organizations, serving 38,000,000+ lines of code to the world through major open source applications and softwares.

GSoC is a competitive program in which students apply to mentoring organizations and compete with other aspirants for their selection. The one who represents best possible coding skills and the proposal to achieve a particular project gets selected.

Selection criteria in GSoC not only depends on proposal and application of the student, but also on your past experience, previous contributions to mentoring organizations and many more…

Students who complete GSoC successfully get a handsome amount of $1500 dollars as a stipend and Certification of Success from Google .

As GSoC is a global program:

In 2021, Students from 103 countries applied for the GSoC, from which 1292 students were selected from 69 countries.

GSoC not only elevates your career opportunities as a student but also have the following key benefits -

Get to learn about the working of a software industry by working on software codebases .
Improve coding skills, soft skills and build your network with engineers, mentors and open source contributors .
More exposure to internship and job based opportunities .
Handsome amount of $1500 dollars as a stipend 🤩.
Build a strong resume along with certification of success from Google .
Tag of being a GSoC student 😎.

My selection in GSoC

I started contributing to open source, during the second semester of my B.Tech graduation. I picked an organization named CircuitVerse to begin my journey with open source.

During this time, I linked up with engineers and team members of CircuitVerse and learnt a lot of new things by collaborating with mentors of the organization. I applied to GSoC as a sophomore and was accepted into GSoC’2021 at CircuitVerse .

I will be working on Internationalization (I18n) of all CircuitVerse platforms and will be gaining work experience with varieties of technologies such as Rails, JavaScript, Flutter, Jekyll DocsifyJs etc.

More about mentoring organization

CircuitVerse is a digital circuit simulation platform which offers easy to use tools for creating, sharing and learning digital logic circuits.

Along with CircuitVerse main platform (written in Rails). Community also maintains -

Simulator (In JavaScript) - For digital circuit simulation
Interactive Book (In Jekyll) - for learning more about Digital Circuits
Mobile App (In flutter) - Providing interface for mobile users
CircuitVerse Desktop App (in electron) - Providing offline interface for desktop users

Go ahead!! start your Open Source journey with CircuitVerse!

This is my acceptance letter from Google