Okay. So, first things first.
I MADE IT!
Yes, I understand that the Google Summer of Code is not supposed to be a competition.
Yes, I know that just because hundreds of thousands of students across the globe apply for the program every year and only around a thousand are selected, this figure is not what GSoC stands for.
Nor, should it be defined in terms of the awesome stipend that it comes with. It’s definitely not something that you are supposed to “crack” (looking at you Indian YouTubers and bloggers)
I get that. I totally do. It is in its true sense a celebration of open source. A festival to welcome young developers to this beautiful world of open source and make them fall in love with it. It is a gateway for new developers to enter this magical world and eventually become a part of it.
And I truly understand and respect the idea. But do hear me out for a moment. In fact, let me take you on a small journey. So, fasten your seat belts and FLASHBACK!!
Last year. The 6th of May, 2019. I remember the date very well. GSoC results were out and I was anxiously typing in my name in the search bar. I found two Pulkit(s) there but not a single one’s surname matched with mine.
That was a huge blow. I was devastated, to say the least. Now, rejection is one thing and it in itself is hard to handle at times but when you pour your heart and soul into a task and give it your best, but eventually you realize that probably your best wasn’t good enough. Now, that! That thought is something that completely destroys you. And to be completely honest and expose my raw feelings to a stranger on the internet (because why not), at that point I felt like an absolute failure and I kept on telling myself over and over as how all my efforts had gone down the drain (which was immature and stupid, I know, but still that’s how I felt at that moment).
Fast Forward. May 4th, 2020. The Force was strong with me this time:)
Having come a long way from basic Python development and having worked on several deep learning-based projects in the past year, this year I chose CCExtractor’s project Poor Man’s Rekognition. I had by now developed a much better understanding of how to work in a community, picked up all the good practices of software development, had also built a solid understanding of what is expected in a good proposal. And that’s when it hit me — All the hard work that I had put in, all the knowledge that I had acquired, all of it was right there, with me, all the time and apparently I had lost absolutely nothing when I had ‘failed’ at GSoC last year.
This is my first blog for GSoC, but it talks less about the technical details and more about personal ones. As a matter of fact, there are 0 technical details, so let’s just call it blog #0.
I plan on writing 7 more blogs during GSoC and this blog will serve as an index file where I will keep on adding links to the other blogs as I write them. These 7 blogs will be technical ones and in them, I will talk about the things that I planned and the way those plans panned out.
