Getting selected in GSoC

So, I got selected as a student in Google Summer of Code(GSOC) 🎉 under AsyncAPI organization through Postman .

I will be working on AsyncDiff which is basically a library which compares two AsyncAPI Documents and generates diff between the two.

Why was I interested in AsyncAPI?

For those who don't know what AsyncAPI is, It is a specification for defining your APIs(mainly event-driven). You can document your APIs as well as generate code from that documentation.

I have been exploring Event Driven Architectures(EDAs) for quite some time and AsyncAPI felt like the right tool for the job(as I always have been a Schema first guy).

I think the best way to contribute to any Open-Source project is to start contributing to the tools you use. So, here I was looking for contribution opportunities in AsyncAPI. What were the odds that AsyncAPI was going to apply for GSoC under Postman (Though they did apply individually, but unfortunately, were rejected 😢 ).

I started looking at their list of projects for GSoC and I choose the diff project because it had some elements of CLI, and I love CLIs.

Having selected the org of my interest, it was the time to make some initial contributions as well as write a proposal for the project.

For initial contributions, I basically wrote some missing tests, which forces you to go through the codebase in order to understand what's to be tested and how. This helped me a lot when writing my proposal.

How I approached the project?

When writing the proposal for your interested project, you should have a clear(not perfect) approach in mind.

I first looked at the summary of the project and tried finding similar tools in order to understand what will the final result. My project had some similarities to git diff , so I started exploring git diff and how it works.

When I was done with my first draft of the proposal, I asked the mentor(& maintainers of the org) for reviews. They helped me a lot in my understanding of the project as well as pointed out the important bits I was missing in the proposal.

After doing several iterations of the proposal, I was still not that confident. But the deadline for the submission was almost here. So, I did the best I could do and submitted it and hoped for the best.

After submitting the proposal

There was a long gap between submission of proposal and announcement of the result, but I wanted to pick up some issues and work on them. This will help me get more familiar with the codebase as well as interact with other folks/maintainers.

Worked on some issues(almost broke some codebase as well :p). This step also helps the project mentor see that you are consistent and do the expected work.

As I said initially in the blog, I got selected. I was really happy and ecstatic. But for those who didn't get selected, know that the main aim of GSoC is to get you started in Open-Source, you can still do it without GSoC.

Here are the main takeways from this blog:

• Get familiar with the codebase and look at similar tools. Get proposal reviewed from the mentor.

• Even after submitting the proposal, you should contribute to your org

• Just keep on contributing even after GSoC