We’re continuing the Google Summer of Code topic. The registration phase has ended some time ago and in a week we’ll meet students who wrote the best proposals and can take part in the GSOC program in their organization. But just a few words about the previous phase: registration into the program, writing proposals to organizations and submitting them.
Registrations to GSOC program
Students who follow the GSOC program for a while or persons who follow our blog knew that the period of time when you can register to the Google Summer Of Code program is short. You have to slightly hurry up if you want to sign up and apply. In fact, a list of organizations and timeline was known before the registration has opened so some of the participants probably prepared their proposals faster. And that was a good choice. Even though, there was a limit of the organization to which you can submit your proposal there was a huge interest. Students were choosing between more than 200 organizations in very different industries. All of them was open-source organizations but with different technologies, requirements, experience and work methodology.
Reviewing the proposals
Each organization has its own requirements so it’s impossible to describe hear all 200 organizations. But, we know about the requirements in OpenMRS, which year to year starts in Google Summer of Code. At their website, they describe some steps before application which student needs to fill up to be able to take part in the program. These are some rules from that year edition:
Before the Application
- Become familiar with OpenMRS and the project(s) for which you’re applying. If relevant, make sure you have OpenMRS installed and running. Read the Developer Guide, Getting Started as a Developer, and ask others in the community if you have questions. If you ask questions the smart way, you’ll get better responses.
- Make sure your development environment is installed and running, and optimized for maximum efficiency. Review our Conventions page.
- Review project ideas & ask questions about those or other projects in the GSoC category on OpenMRS Talk.
- Spend as much time as possible in our IRC channel or Telegram chat, as well as on OpenMRS Talk with other community members. Remember, GSoC-specific questions should be asked on Talk.
- Introduce yourself on the community introduction page on OpenMRS Talk.
- Achieve /dev/1 status. (earn the /dev/null badge and then earn the Smart Developer badge by passing the quiz).
- Work on JIRA tickets. Pick some tickets from JIRA (#community-priority tickets, under your targeting project, or anywhere) and work on those tickets. Send the pull request with your changes to respective repository
- Run, test and identity some potential issues in OpenMRS Core or modules. Create new tickets in JIRA if those are not reported yet.
- Increase your visibility on OpenMRS Talk and IRC. Help others on Talk and participate in other’s discussions as much as possible.
- Do some code reviews. Reviewing code from others is one of the great ways to learn the OpenMRS code base. This is a must. No student will be selected who has not done code reviews.
- If you’re returning to do GSoC with OpenMRS for a repeat term, be just as thorough (or more so!) than first-time students. Don’t skip steps and work extra hard to impress your mentor(s).
- Additional expectations :
- Write some blogs about OpenMRS or any related matters on OpenMRS which can help others.
- Properly document your work in JIRA and help others to continue from it.
As you see, they’re not so hard to fulfil, rather I would say that somebody who codes is able to do all steps in one day. You have to remember that’s not all which guarantee you a seat in OpenMRS’ GSOC program. Your proposal and what you offer to the organization must be of high value and well prepared. I mean you need to include a real timeline and what you want to achieve during that period.
In the next article I would like to describe the process from the background and maybe I’ll share some statistics so stay tuned!
