Okay, so as I posted last week, I’ve been selected for the Google Summer of code program for the year 2017, and I’ll be working with DBpedia. As an integral part of my project, I’ll have to record my progress on my project every week, and so, I’ll be posting all my GSoC related posts under the GSoC tag.

Okay, so how did this journey start?

I guess it started back in December last year, when I was at home spending time with my family during the winter vacations. I was trying to do something “actually” useful from whatever I had learned so far. So, I decided to check out a few Open Source organizations. After browsing through the many great organizations, DBpedia caught my eye. I visited the ideas page, and looked at the kind of ideas they were working on and wanted to expand into. I started to get more involved with the community and interacted with them. Went to their github page and checked out their projects, how they worked and got some idea about how the entire organization works.

Then I browsed the ideas page for the ideas I would’ve be interested in, and started interacting with the respective project mentors. I was interested in quite a few projects, but in the end decided to solely focus on the list-extractor. As the organizations list was announced, all the ideas were updated with warm-up tasks, and I finished the warm up tasks that were assigned by my mentor, Marco. We discussed some approaches and ideas about how the current list-extractor was working and what could be done to improve that. After some productive discussions, I decided to write a proposal for the project. I’d been following the idea for 3 months by then, and knew the existing code inside out. So, as discussed with my mentor, I came up with my proposal, explaining all the new features and domains I planned to add and how it would benefit the community. Since I was writing the proposal for the first time, I didn’t come up with the best of proposals, and my deliverables and timeline was a bit vague. But with proper feedback from my mentor, I was able to improve it and finally submitted my proposal.

Then came the agonizing 1 month wait for the result. I was pretty confident of my chances, because I had a solid proposal and had a good interaction with my mentor, but you can never be sure. So, I tried not to think about it and got back to my university work, which I conveniently ignored during this time, as a result of which my university workload for the rest of the semester remained immense. So much for taking it easy, eh?

So finally, the day was here. 4th may. The results were going to be out at 21:30 IST. It was afternoon and I was a tad bit nervous. Also, I slept for like 9 hours in the past 4 days due to exams and project presentations. I was sleepy, so I decided to take a small nap. And as with all naps, I woke up many hours later, not knowing what time or place it was, and my head all being groggy. It took me a few minutes to come back to reality, at which point I realized it was 22:06 and the result was out. And now, along with grogginess, I was feeling nauseated too. Somehow, I gathered all my strength, and opened the GSoC website. And then suddenly, all of my sickness turned into pure joy, as I realized I was selected. I smiled rechecked the result again just to make sure I wasn’t still sleeping. Once I realized it was indeed real, I called my parents and told them about it. They were very happy and the conversation lasted for a while.

After that, I sat outside with a slight breeze blowing across my face thinking,what happens now? Sipping on the milkshake I just bought, I thought “Community bonding starts tomorrow… Tonight might be the final free night I have. I must celebrate and do something that makes me happy…"

So, I finished my milkshake, and went back to my room, and slept for 11 hours straight.

That day, was a good day!