The contribution period and my proposal

It’s the last week of the community bonding period and I’m currently working on my cEP as well as on creating milestones. More details on that will follow in my next post.

I want to use this post to document my journey up to the proposal submission deadline, 13 April. The organizations for GSoC’21 were announced on 10th March, giving students around 4 weeks to find organisations, contribute to their codebase, choose a project idea and ultimately make a proposal. I was browsing the list of organisations on the 10th and shortlisted a few which I felt were interesting. In the next few days, I joined the public channels of these organisations and tried to make myself familiar with their codebase. After a week, it had become clear to me that I wanted to contribute, and eventually submit a proposal, to coala.

Initially, I closed a few small, beginner issues in the coala repository on GitHub. There were also many stale Pull Requests which required only minor changes before they could be ready to merge. So, I decided to cherry-pick those commits and made new Pull Requests which were ultimately merged into coala.

Around 20th March, as I began browsing through the project ideas’ list, I stumbled upon an idea titled ‘Gitmate for coala’. I had seen Gitmate being used in the coala GitHub repository, so I had a fair idea of its functioning and role in coala. I decided to explore Gitmate in more depth. I set up the backend and the frontend development environments and made a few pull requests relating to the CI pipeline and other minor changes. I also decided to set up the IGitt environment and check out the underlying library which had been powering Gitmate.

After a few days of poking around the Gitmate code, I realized how useful Gitmate is and how it needs to be upgraded and activated again for the benefit of the coala community. I decided that I would submit a proposal for Gitmate.

I began working on my proposal on 25th March, with insights and much help from my mentor, Abhinav. While writing my proposal, I kept contributing to coala and this helped make me more familiar with Gitmate, ultimately resulting in a deeper understanding of its issues which reflected in my proposal.

I submitted a draft of my proposal through the Google Summer of Code website and was able to get detailed reviews from Abhinav. I improved upon the initial draft and submitted my proposal on 13th April.

I took a short break of 2–3 days after this and I was back to contributing to coala after that. I kept making pull requests to Gitmate for the next one month and closed various issues.

On the 17th of May, at exactly 11:19 pm, I received a mail from the Google Summer of Code team, stating that my proposal ‘Gitmate for coala’ had been accepted!