TL;DR
No, it won’t be easy, but it’s surely not impossible and trust me it’s worth it.
Things you should know
This blog entails my journey, it might not be the same for you!
Flashback
Well, I got to know about GSoC in 2016 from Quora, when the only thing I knew about coding was to print patterns and pyramids in C and C++ language. I got very inspired by reading about the journeys of many GSoC students. At that time, I decided no matter what, I will definitely grab GSoC’er tag at least once in my college tenure. So, in my third year of college, I applied for the JGraphT organization, but my proposal got rejected. Today I received a letter from Google Summer of Code mentioning that my proposal has been accepted. This isn’t a success story. It is a story where I learned from my mistakes and kept trying to achieve one of my life goals.
Why Libre Space Foundation?
To be honest, I didn’t contribute to any open source project before this time. So I didn’t know about many organizations. I’m intrigued by Space since childhood so thought of giving it a try for Libre Space Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation registered since 2014 in Greece from the creators of the SatNOGS project. Their mission is to promote, advance and develop libre (free and open source) technologies and knowledge for space. To do that they design, develop and deliver space-related projects ranging from Ground Station equipment to global monitoring Networks and satellite missions. So these things got aligned with my interests and here I am, now a community member of Libre Space Foundation.
Buffer Period
The Period from April’18 to January’19 goes under the head of a buffer period as during this period, though working in a way for GSoC, I was unaware of it. Confused? Well, I was improving myself as a developer, little did I know, it helped me carve out a strong profile for GSoC.
I learned a lot! A lot believe me! Well, it was fun so couldn’t stop. I stepped into the realm of machine learning and was enthralled by the aesthetics of it. **It’s Fascinating, Diverse, Not Magic, Creative, Science and it’s free of cost!
January’19
Before getting in full throttle for GSoC I was already exploring a depths of machine learning and I absolutely fell in love with it. (Well, Andrew Ng, instructor for machine learning course on Coursera, did a great job at convincing me to learn machine learning even further and so I did). After watching his videos and some podcasts from MIT, I took some time to get acquainted with this beast of technology.
Since GSoC was always somewhere in my mind and as soon as January hit the calendar, I was already checking out previous year’s organizations and accepted student proposals, by then it was already clear to me that I’ll be applying to a project in machine learning.
Now I knew what I had to do for the GSoC! Find a project that interests me, in machine learning and hone machine learning skills. There goes January.
February’19
With the GSoC’s timeline already synced with my Google calendar. I was ready for the organizations to be rolled out and their projects, February 26, was the day when organizations were announced and I remember, the very next day sitting down creating a list of the organization in which I could apply given my repertoire.
The list had a decent amount of diverse field from web-development to Astronomy. I listed what are the best projects within my reach and made a separate list of the things that I’ve to learn about the organization and the project itself. This part was very important and crucial, listing out everything helped me focus on the areas that I really need to improve on.
After scrolling through the whole organizations’ page and 5 hours later, I had a full list and plan devised and ready to be executed. Steps that followed were:
Joined the community channel whether it was on gitter, slack, matrix or an IRC.
Talked to the mentors and discussed with them about the plan that I would follow.
Took a good check of the heat in competition. (This was another important factor, as some students were with the organizations way before and chose to apply this year only.)
After talking and studying a lot I was convinced that I’ll be applying to Libre Space Foundation. The project that catches my attention is Machine Learning for Cubesat Telemetry and Diagnostics (codename: Polaris). I started actively discussing my solution approach in the community, mentors helped me in building solution architecture and drafting a proposal.
March’19
I started working on solution architecture. Thinking about how we can fetch data, which machine learning models we can apply (I even proposed a big data architecture), how can we visualize the parameters that are important for the health of spacecraft. If it wasn’t for my mentors, I would’ve lost the competition before it even began. But designing and developing the architecture for Polaris and that too in an acceptable open source style is not sufficient. With the understanding of project and solution architecture, I required a precise and well-formed proposal. Writing a proposal? puff, easy-peasy, right? NO! Writing a proposal was the most time-consuming process, took me the whole of March. You can find a link to my project here.
April’19
This period felt longest for me as I waited for the results every day. During this period, I was so into GSoC and Libre Space Foundation that even in my sleep I started having dreams of getting selected, rejected, working on the project, training machine learning models, debugging the code, etc.!! xD. So basically, I was just waiting for the result to come through, every single day!
After a long wait from 9th April to 6th May, finally, Google rolled out the names of the selected students! I checked my dashboard on GSoC’s website, ever so tremblingly and Alas, my name was not there!
I got you! Well, I made it. I got a mail from Google with the subject “GSoC 2019: Congratulations, your proposal with Libre Space Foundation has been accepted!”. May 6th, 2019, will always be one of the dates that I’ll cherish.
My Mentors
Redouane Boumghar (@redsharpbyte) for ESA-SOCIS : Data scientist for space ops
Xabier Crespo Alvarez (@crespum) for GSoC: Embedded Systems Consultant
A Little About Myself
Currently, I am pursuing Bachelor of Technology in Information Technology (2015–2019), from Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, India. I am a self-taught developer. I believe in open source software movement. I like to build things from scratch. I am a newbie in the open source world and Libre Space Foundation is my first organization where I am contributing. Apart from coding, I like photography, trekking, and biking. I like to read, but I don’t read novels that much. I can spend hours on one go, reading encyclopedias or science mags ツ.
Please find the appropriate link below should anyone choose to view my code/progress or have a social conversation.
In the end,
I would like to acknowledge and extend my heartfelt gratitude to many other Libre Space Foundation developers and contributors for helping me out whenever I got stuck somewhere and getting me started in my open source journey.
Open source rocks!