The Evening

Published on Medium.com here

This is the concluding part of my three-part GSoC journey blog, and if you have come up till here reading the other two parts then THANK YOU SO MUCH! Thank you for bearing with me and reading with patience this boring guy. But if you haven’t read the other two parts and jumped in straight here then first of all, thank you for stopping here. However, I’d suggest you to give the first two parts this and this a read to get into the flow.

It is evening right now, and we are already on the third part of the blog. I am not sure whether I have been able to keep you still in the flow because the former two parts of this series were lengthy, extremely lengthy. But I will try to keep this as short as possible while avoiding every chance of an abrupt ending, afterall I don’t write crime thrillers!

So, I have already talked a lot about most of the technical details of the project. And those which I left were mostly too deep to be included in a blog post. I don’t expect my readers to be explicitly from a very technical background, but I do expect them to get an idea of how GSoC works after reading it. I am myself a tech geek but I do love writing a lot (I hope you would have known this fact untill now).

During the project, many times I felt really stuck at some point. I felt like what was I really doing? But then those are the moments wherein you need to show off the power of your will. For when you feel like giving up, just keep your breath for a few moments and that is how you’ll convert that one crazy thing into a breakthrough. I am just a fan of this mindset and most of the things I am doing in my life is like just keep going. And GSoC will teach this very thing very efficiently to anybody.

My mentors have always been very very helpful. They held my hand everytime I asked for their help. Before introducing a new thing into the workflow they would make sure that I was friendly with the new change. If I had no previous experience with the feature, then they would give me brief yet great explainer every time. This made my journey so smooth. But I did face some critical challenges while building the package.

• One of the greatest challenges was building the package itself from a state where it was totally broken to a state where it is working nice, and the latest release into production. It was as if building the package from scratch. I had to clean up all previous obsolete functions, create new ones for the updated endpoints and cater to the new standards in building. To be honest it feels really too simple on paper but it was a huge task. The package underwent major upgrades twice during this period - and not just the code itself, ut the docs, notebooks, and examples all had to be changed. But, it was a great learning experience overall.

• During my whole summer, I had my exams twice in three months. And just in the middle of the project I fell ill. I couldn’t take up any work for almost a week. I communicate this news to my mentors. And they were so kind enough to drop any calls for a week and wished for my speedy recovery. I just couldn’t get any better mentors.

• I was completely new to python packaging, and I really didn’t know where to start at first. It was a lot of hit and trial during the application period with the package that I started to understand how it all worked. Thanks to my mentors who helped me throughout in many ways that I now understand the beauty and intricacies of python packaging. To be honest, it was fun!

• I wasn’t much acquainted to the GitHub workflow and getting used to was a bit tricky. But again thanks to my mentors especially @7yl4r, I just got so used to it. Opening PRs, creating issues, rebasing and merging feels so easy now.

Challenges do come and go by only when we hold our breath to the right time.

It is true that the 3 months you’ll spend on your project won’t just be about writing code and building softwares, it will also help you build your personality a lot. You will experience an exponential growth in not only your programming skills but also your communication skills. To summarize, Google Summer of Code is a never miss opportunity for sure!