The final fence to jump before being called a GSoCer. Aiming to be called one? Read on.
For the past 3 months I have been working on the Poll App Mega Extensions project at Rocket.Chat as a part of Google Summer of Code. I had successfully passed my First Evaluations from my mentor Ramkumar KB.
The final evaluations are more involved. Rocket.Chat has a “GSoC Tradition” of having students present their projects before the entire Rocket.Chat team, mentors and other GSoCers. I’ll also be revealing my proposal (31 pages!) at the end of this blog post. Finally, I’ll touch upon the future work required within the Poll App in case you’re a GSoC aspirant and want to work on it.
GSoC Final Evaluations
The first thing GSoC Final evaluations form will ask you is to provide a work product link. This can be either in the form of a GitHub Gist, a repository or a blog post. In all it should summarize your work done, PRs and issues opened, merged or closed and your experience within the 3 months of GSoC.
Here’s the link to my report — Rohan Lekhwani | GSoC Report.
The next section within the evaluation form is about your GSoC experience. This involves questions like “were you able to meet all your goals”, your favorite and most challenging parts about GSoC, number of hours dedicated. The data here is probably used by Google to evaluate the popularity and areas of improvement within their program.
The organization section includes questions as a feedback to Google about the organization. I’m pretty sure Google uses this section to filter out organizations the next GSoC season from the ones who didn’t receive a good feedback.
The following section is regarding your Growth which focuses whether GSoC helped you get a job or an internship, did it improve your programming skills, anything else you learned from your GSoC experience.
The final section includes the “Everything Else” section. It forms a miscellaneous section asking you whether you’d like to be a mentor the next GSoC season, any feedback for your organization (your answer to this question will be shared with your organization), any advice for future GSoC aspirants and suggestions for future GSoCs.
Both student and mentor evaluations questions can be found here. The ones listed here were almost exactly worded as the ones mentioned in the evaluation form.
Rocket.Chat’s GSoC Tradition
Rocket.Chat has maintained a streak of getting selected into GSoC since 2017 with 7+ projects at the least. This year Rocket.Chat broke records with their highest number of projects getting selected — a whopping 12 projects!
In parallel with GSoC final evaluations, Rocket.Chat organizes an internal “Demo Presentation” for all students. These presentations are attended by almost the entire Rocket.Chat engineering team including the CEO Gabriel Engel and CTO Rodrigo Nascimento.
It was a real fun experience to showcase my work in front of the community. The only question everyone had on mind was “When will it be on the Marketplace?” (xD).
The entire recording can be viewed at Rocket.Chat’s YouTube channel. Here’s the video link.
In case you’re interested in checking out the presentation, I’ve made it publicly accessible here.
And Voila!
I was able to surpass my planned proposal by even including an additonal feature not mentioned earlier — Late Retrieval of Live Polls. Result?
Google also mentioned since previous year a lot of students were requesting for a completion certificate, it’ll be provisioning them along with a super secret link to be on Google’s watchlist for opportunities.
If you’ve been following along in this blog series, you would know I have been maintaining a GitHub Kanban board for my project progress. Here’s how it looks now:
Speaking of PRs I ranked up by a position on the GSoC Contribution Leaderboard which Rocket.Chat maintains every year at gsoc.rocket.chat. I’m ranked 4th of all the people who contributed. The board doesn’t include RC4GitHub and RC4Community repositories, which if accounted for rank me first.
Future Work
It’s truly amazing to see all your PRs merged within the main codebase. We are currently on track to release Poll App 3.0.0 out to the world on Rocket.Chat’s Marketplace.
I planned a lot of features as extra deliverables which can be seen in my proposal shared below. A super-important future work for a GSoC aspirant would be to expand the additional Poll modes feature into templates for Retro, Daily Standup, All Hands, etc. This is similar to what Polly offers.
Another useful feature would be the poll summary feature allowing users to see their configurations before posting the Poll. This would result in a lesser number of incorrect and misconfigured polls created.
As Promised
GSoC aspirant? Here’s something for you.
I wrote two proposals for GSoC one was 18 pages and the other one (which got selected) is 31 pages! Apart from that I also created Figma designs for both the projects shared below.
Poll App Mega Extensions Proposal Link
Poll App Mega Extensions Figma Designs Link
Community Collaboration: Improvements Proposal Link
Community Collaboration: Improvements Designs Link
Planning to apply to the upcoming GSoC? Comment your questions/doubts or reach out to me.
Hurray! This forms my final bi-weekly blog about my GSoC journey at Rocket.Chat. I’ll be continuously writing about what I code and build, so if you haven’t yet — hit that follow button on DEV and Medium 🌟.
My previous blog in this sereis was about GSoC Coding Phase 2, go check it out now — it includes an unexpected climax when you feel everything’s going smooth.
GSoC Coding Phase 2: Challenge Is an Understatement
Like what I do? Help me pull my next all-nighter. Consider buying me a coffee.🥤
Rohan Lekhwani is an open source contributor and enthusiast. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, and his website.
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