It’s 11:26 pm on the 6th of May, 2019 — GSoC results day. Thousands of people who have worked very hard and submitted their proposals for GSoC 2019 are waiting with bated breath. In a few minutes (this is probably debatable, depending on where you live in the world, but anyways) 1276 people, out of the thousands who have applied, will be having one of the best moments of their lives.

I am one of them.

Hi. I am Aniruddha Karajgi, better known as Polaris000, my online nick. I am a GSoC student with CHAOSS, working on the project Implementing CHAOSS metrics with Perceval. My project involves creating reference implementations for the metrics defined by the Growth Maturity and Decline working group at CHAOSS using Perceval, a grimoirelab tool. The project will involve using pandas, jupyter notebooks and visualization libraries like seaborn and matplotlib. Perceval will also be improved as and when required.

This post is a first in a series of weekly posts which would follow my journey over the summer with CHAOSS.

Let me tell you how it all began.

If you are not aware, Google Summer of Code is the pinnacle of technological achievement for engineering students in India and its considered very prestigious for several reasons, some obvious and several not so obvious. Needless to say, I was introduced to it about midway through my freshman year at university.

I fell in love with programming around the time my first year began and though I really wanted to participate in GSoC, I just did what I loved and did n’t exactly follow a linear and structured route. I had no idea what I wanted to do or where my interests lay, but one thing was sure — it had to be something to do with python.

Fast forward several months to New Year’s eve 2018. I went to the summer of code archives to start looking for something that interested me. By this point, I was leaning in the direction of data science and maching learning. Within minutes, I realilzed it was a waste of time going through each and every organization in the archives. My seniors at university had told me to favour projects that had been participating in GSoC for the past few years, since they were more likely to get selected again.

This made my search harder, since I now had to track the same organization through the past few years. I did what any programmer would – a simple python script to create a yearly list of organizations, the programming languages and technologies they use as well the organization website. And though it is not pretty, I got it to work in under an hour so I did n’t focus much on ascthetics.

By January 5th, I had reduced the list from hundreds of organizations to 2. One of them was CHAOSS.

On the 7th of the same month, my first fix was merged. And though it was a simple grammatical error in the tutorial documentation, it marked a very important moment in human history — my first foray into open source.

Over the next few months, I contributed to CHAOSS, everything from improving Perceval to fixing typos and adding improving documentation wherever required.

On the 9th of April, 11:15 pm, I submitted the last revision of my proposal. The results were due on the 6th of May and though I was apprehensive, I found the wait exciting.

CHAOSS requires its applicants to finish several microtasks related to the project they are interested in. My mid semester exams ended on the 16th of March and after spending upwards of nine hours a day, it took me approximately a week to finish my microtasks.

On the 26th of March, I started working on my proposal, which was due on the 9th of April. I have to admit, it took a lot longer than expected. And though I was clear with the project idea and the deliverables, there is something tricky about creating timeline for a three-month long project starting almost two months in the future.

Four months and several bad grades later, the wait was finally over. The 6th of May, 2019 had finally arrived. Though I felt like I had a decent chance of getting in, the other students applying for my project weren’t exactly noobs when it came to data analysis in Python. They had worked just as hard as me, if not harder.

My finals were going on during the results period. I ended up wasting the better part of a day, so excited about the results, I could hardly do anything else. I knew all the applicants would get an email with the results starting 11:30pm. What I didn’t know was that the results would also be up on the summer of code website.

When the page loaded (bad internet), I found my project among those selected for the Google Summer of Code, 2019.

I am one of them…