Atlast, it's a dream come true. It was since my first year at college that I wanted to acquire this prestigious title of The GSoC. I am happy that I made it in the first attempt.

This summer, I will be spending my time with the GNU Mailman Project, creating a CLI for the GNU Mailman. Really excited that I will be working with such a popular and legacy project. The GNU Mailman is participating under the Python Software Foundation umbrella, which further adds sheen to my project, as the project is listed under the PSF organisation.

I had begun early with GSoC this year, with valuable inputs by Vijeenrosh PW about the process and procedures. I found 2 projects really interesting, the Mailman CLI and the Plagiarism plugin for Moodle.As a starter I developed a file upload feature for Mailman Postorious and fixed a bug for moodle.I also made a preliminary discussion with the both project's mentors about the projects, long before the GSoC season, which gave me a good head start.

The application process for both projects went fine and I was able to come up with fairly good proposals to both the projects, thanks to training by Valsaraj Sir during my mini projects. The Mailman proposal was reviewed largely by the mentor of the project Stephen Turnbull, asking me to rewrite some parts of it for a better readability. The Moodle proposal was reviewed by the mentor Dan Marsden, who requested to refine the timeline.

The mentor from Moodle kept close contact with me by requesting to work on more patches to Moodle that can be helpful for my application. I submitted 3 patches to Moodle, out of which one was accepted to Moodle codebase. Also, he shared a bare bone repository of the plugin that was to be used if the project gets accepted to GsoC,and asked to design a database for it. At the last phase of the application process, Dan asked if I had applied to any other project and if successful in both, which one would I prefer. I was in a situation that is a popular interview question “Describe the toughest situation that you faced and what decision you made?”. I was almost sure that I am accepted into Moodle, but I liked Mailman more, as it was similar to some of my previous works and it was python , and that proposal too had received assuring comments from the mentors. Further, the mailman CLI project has no existing code, and I am to start the project from scratch, which is a huge advantage.

I finally decided to take a huge risk by telling the Moodle mentor that I liked the other project more, and he said he will drop moodle application if I get successful in both.

Atlast, everything ended fine on April 22nd, when the results were announced informing me that I was in. I could not wait until midnight owing to some health issues but I woke up around some 2 AM and checked email from my phone. Inbox contained a congrats from Melange and one from Vijeen. 

Hoping for the best ever summer ahead!