Hey guys! So, I hope you all must have heard about GSoC if you are a college student, if not take a look here. Okay, so now let's begin with my journey from being a noob to working as a SDE at FOSSASIA , to now getting into GSoC with DIAL.
About Myself
Myself Meghal Bisht, I am currently in 3rd year pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science from AIACTR [now NSUT], Delhi. I am going to spend my summer with GSoC under DIAL organization, I am working as an SDE in FOSSASIA from the past 4 months. I code in Javascript, Typescript and Python. I am more into Web Development and well not a big fan of Competitive coding to be honest! Apart from this, I am a Delhite so a big foodie and I love to play games [pubg, among us etc].
Journey
So, I'll be completely honest. And here is an interesting thing, last year in January 2020 my family bought me a laptop so that I can study as apparently every engineering student should have a laptop lol.
So, at that time I was confused, not knowing what to do I started searching random things, from what an engineer should do to seeing people boast about their achievements on LinkedIn (and it was in March last year so you know GSoC posts were all over the social media) and then getting frustrated I switched back to games.
But soon I realised this switching back and forth won't last long and I should focus more on learning. I started with a few YouTube videos. I use to hardly understand what they say, most things passed by me. It was a lot frustrating at times. Trust me, the most frustrating moment is when you start, eventually it becomes better.
So, I spent around 4 months learning things, I started with the basics, made small projects which I am still proud of. Projects which should have taken a few days actually took a few weeks. But that was okay, I was just starting.
In mid Aug, I came to know about Open Source, I spent a week googling about it, searching YouTube, came to know about Open Source Programs and then GSoC caught my eye again.
I was already upset, people my age were doing internships and getting offers and here I was sitting idle and regretting every decision I made up until now. But, it was enough and now I had to plan what I was going to do. My pre final year was about to start and I had to do something.
This is when I started my Open Source journey. I started with FOSSASIA, joined the organisation in November, they had a coding contest Codeheat and I decided to give it a try. It took me almost a week to set up the project locally in my system. And took me a month to understand what was going on in the project. I wasn't aware of the frameworks they were using and hence I took a long time to get myself familiarised with the code base.
Finally, I was able to make contributions, started with small bug fixes, it is a good way to understand any project. Then, to adding new features, to reviewing others work I was able to move forward.
And as we all hear, hardwork always pays off, after contributing 2 months in the organisation, I was selected as the Grand Prize Winner of the contest. It was a cherishing moment, the frustration was gone. I was happy and to add to the happiness I was offered a SDE role in FOSSASIA based on my contributions. It took me hours to come to terms with the reality. I was super excited and joined as an SDE in February 2021, almost a year after I got my laptop.
The next goal was to get into GSoC, and fortunately FOSSASIA participated as a sub organisation under DIAL this year. The applications were finally out. I drafted and submitted 2 proposals just in case I wasn't selected in DIAL. The results were to be announced next month and I was anxious every day thinking what would happen. Soon came the day, at 11:30pm I got a mail, closed my eyes and opened it.
BINGO! I was selected for GSoC. I look forward to a summer full of learnings, earnings and excitement and I wish the same for you too! :)
Thank you for reading!