So you want to do Google Summer of Code with the Julia Language 🪅
With the announcement of expanded eligibility for Google Summer of Code (GSoC), there are likely to be a lot of new folks considering getting involved. This post will go over my suggestions after helping review hundreds of applications over the last two years for the Julia Language.
Tip #1: The best time to get started is now. No really! While I don’t have the empirical data at hand, there is a direct correlation between the time in which someone applying for GSoC gets involved in a community and their likelihood to get selected. If the admins and maintainers already know who you are and can speak to your work, it is a no brainer to select you!
Tip #2: Take the leap, start contributing! If you are new to the Julia contributor ecosystem, we have a freshly minted page on the JuliaLang website to get you started: https://julialang.org/contribute/ This page covers many of the ways you can get started without making a significant time commitment.
Tip #3: Find a project and mentor to guide you. Mentors are your #1 advocates during the GSoC selection process and beyond. They are ultimately the ones who decide if you are selected and shape your GSoC experience. Mentors are also generally extremely busy juggling a job, maintaining open source code, and more. This means there is a burden on you as the prospective contributor to do as much work as possible without taking too much time from the mentor. A great approach here is to try and tackle an issue or the like. If you can do it without help, awesome! If you can’t, that is totally natural. Try to keep discussions in public. Private messaging mentors is generally frowned upon. Opening an issue or a draft pull request and saying:
“Hey, I am trying to do XYZ to prepare me for GSoC, I currently have this ____ but am stuck with this thing ___. I already tried this resource and that resource.”
What this tells a mentor is that you care, you tried things on your own, and you already looked up the obvious solutions online. This step is critical!
If you want to see last years projects you can find them here: https://julialang.org/jsoc/projects/ we will be updating this list with new projects through the beginning of GSoC in 2022.
In summary, we would love to have you as part of the community and as a contributor during GSoC. If you want to find out more about previous GSoC contributors experinces, you can see the video below.
~ Logan on behalf of the JSoC Admins
Edit: My Co-author and I are thrilled to share that pre-orders our new book, Julia Crash Course, are now live:
