Starting Out In GSoC

Hello all,

This is the first post in a series of posts, in which I will cover my Google Summer Of Code(GSoC) experience.

I remember that I had heard about GSoC back when I was in my first year of college education, but I never actually tried to participate in the event thinking that its just only for the elite programmers. But finally on my third year of college education, I finally thought “I should atleast try” and with that I started my preparations for GSoC‘16. I started preparing for the event from early January.

I started out with visiting all the previously selected organizations, and collected information specifically on -

• What kind of proposals get selected, and which ones don’t
• What are different steps involved in participating in GSoC
• What are the various pre requisites for various organizations and projects
• Read all possible links related to summer of code, and about the program

After my initial analysis of various organizations, I started picking out various organizations with which I would like to work with over the summer. I already had set my mind that I will only work on projects involving python as I had recently learned that langauge and was excited to further strenthen my skills in it. Already knowing what tech stack I wanted to work with really helped me out in selecting the organization.

Some of the organizations that I had selected were -

• C3G : Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics, org working on computational genomics
• BioJS : Another awesome org working on computational biology and visualization
• ScraPy : Related to web scraping
• CC Extractor : I was interested in their infrastructure related project idea.
• myhdl : Org with projects on Hardware Descripting Languages in python
• Ascend : Org focussing on computational chemistry

After short listing orgs, I started sending out emails to the prospective mentors & mailing lists of the projects that I was interested in. I got a lot of psotive feedback from many mentors. And then, I started focussing on the projects that really interested me. Out of all of them SegAnnDB project idea, from C3G stood out to me.

The Org -

C3G is a org completely focussed on computational biology. Mind you, it was a field that I literally knew nothing about. But, I really wanted to understand this, and do this project. It was a nice challenge as well. So after 5 years I started learning about biology and genomics again.

I studied computational genomics day and night for a few days, so that I can better understand all the intricacies involved with the project. This was a very crucial step and it really helped in understanding my project inside out.

Needless to say, a lot of credit goes to my project mentor Toby Hocking as well. He is a wonderful guy and he pointed me to all the correct resources to read through.

The Proposal -

After some good and positive discussions about the project with my mentor, I started working on my project proposal. As for C3G we already had a proposal template. And after some modifications in my draft, I finally submitted it to google and then the month long wait started. It was the longest wait ever, I remember I used to check GSoC dashboard alomst on an hourly basis everyday.

That’s it for now. In my next post I will cover more details about my project and what I plan to acheive in this coming summer.