For those of you who do not know what GSoC (Google Summer of Code) is, its a summer program paid by Google for students who want to contribute to open source/ learn a ton + earn some cash doing this. Carol Smith, heads the Summer of Code program. to know more about them check the FAQ. My official coding time started on 23rd of this month. I’ll be working on improving the plugin manager for DokuWiki….
DokuWiki is a Wiki which is meant to be used by small companies and developers to create documentation of any type. From my point of view, its a organization with very friendly people and GAWD programmers :)
I was bummed about ThinkUp not being selected as a participating org for GSoC this year and was looking for other orgs when I met Michael Hamann(Michitux).
He said he was very impressed by my noobness and probably that made me even more interested in the project. Then I had the college project, semester papers etc etc. I got to know that Google is allowing only 2 slots to new orgs and was scared that I might not get selected. phpMyAdmin marked my proposal as ignored by mistake and that freaked me out even more! Turns out, they did it to resolve a dedupe (self praise :P :P)
On 26th April morning 12:30, Michael announced “okay, I think time has come to congratulate our two accepted students, kate_a and piyushmishra!”
PS: I read kinga_ instead of kate_a and was looking for him (sorry brother if that hurt :( )
A zillion things crossed my mind in that second…. Each of them probably deserves a post of its own. So I’ll not bore you out with them in this one.
Michael is now the org admin for DokuWiki, as he puts it he’ll be “doing things no one else wants to do”
I think I had the first real talk with my mentor, Håkan Sandell, after getting selected. You wont find him on any social network, because “its not my style ;)”. He’s an awesome guy! He sails, climbs mountains to relax etc etc etc. He’s got a day job in an electronics company and gets into the programmer mode after that. He makes me think harder on any thing I take for granted and am loving it ;) I almost test everything for alternatives before I put it in codes right now.
I am looking forward to making out the most of the whole GSoC period in terms of learning and hopefully will be making the experience of DokuWiki users more awesome!
Cheers to Kate Arzamastseva, the lady who also got selected for DokuWiki, GSoC. Project : Media Revisions.