Before GSoC '20

I had decided that I want to participate in GSoC 2020 sometime around September 2019. This is quite early 😂, considering that there were still five months for the organizations to be announced. But, I still went through the organizations that participated in GSoC, 2019. I knew that I would be very comfortable working with robotics-related projects. So, I looked through the organizations which had projects in this field. I also followed through and tried to understand as much as I can the projects undertaken by each of the organizations. Since I had ample time before I decided which organization I wanted to work for, I had the luxury to take things slow and get familiar with many things. This included forking relevant repositories, following their tutorials to set up the environment, etc. By January 2020, I had made a prioritized list of organizations that I would like to work for and hoped that they participate again in GSoC, 2020.

Once the list of participating organizations was announced in February, I was delighted to see all the organizations on my list were indeed participating again ❤️. I looked at the project lists of these organizations and was very much drawn to the project “Software agent for estimating occupancy in medium and large buildings using RGB cameras” from RoboComp. I contacted the mentors of the project, who were very friendly and helpful in explaining what the project was about. I was quite active in the discussion forum of RoboComp, helping my fellow GSoC aspirants when they faced some issues while setting up the RoboComp environment and also getting help from them. I also started looking at various issues in the Human-Detection repository and tried to fix simple bugs that I could find.

As the proposal submission date approached, I had decided to apply only for this project which I know was a big risk as it is always better to have backup options. I had spent almost a week in drafting and perfecting my only proposal. This, I think is the most important step in any GSoC application. The way the proposal is written plays the most important role in deciding whether you are selected or not. This is my pre-GSoC experience 😌.