Incredible reasons I make a recommendation to apply to GSoC despite never got accepted

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier I was not able to get into Google Summer of Code 2019.

Despite things never worked out as my expect, I do not despaired at all. Why?
One of the potential reasons is that I was able to take the first big step toward wonderful OSS committer. I will walk you through what happened and what I got during the period of discussing application ideas with mentoring organizations.

0, What is Google Summer of Code?

First, for those that aren’t familiar, may be better to explain what GSoC is and what it does; in brief, you can concentrate on developing open source software while getting paid to do it. You can work with incredible mentors who act as guides. In order to get into that, you’ve got to find exciting projects, and write the best proposal you could.

1, Rook had me on in the organization

Looping back to the previous topic, Rook is the organization that I applied for, a cloud-native storage orchestrator running in Kubernetes. After several commits, I encountered such this email:

It could be thought first awesome event, Rook let me be part of the organization! I’m well aware of the fact that the reason is he just wanted to assign me to an issue, yet it was a big step for me. Really wish to develop a long-range relationship with them.

2, Profound discussion

I’ve never engaged in deep discussion about issues within open source software though have experience fixing tiny bugs several times. I worked on some discussions for the first time over a period of days (at least, the time zone would be also affecting a little…)
What I’m a non-native speaker of English was one of the causes of making myself suffer, it was hard to get used to cultural differences rather than English grammar problems. Engaging in deep discussion in such a situation was tough to beat for me. Nevertheless, the desire to be accepted took me to deep in discussion. Thus, I broke through the first barriers facing me.

3, Deepened my understanding of the technology area that interests me

I was able to look out over the interesting technology landscape and deepen my understanding of what kind of problem they have. Actually, the first project I paid attention to was another one named Containerd. During the course of diving into the issues they have, I encountered the Rook project. In the Cloud Native world where I am passionate about, I found that each project interacted, and explored various possibilities. I grasped what they’d be going to do and what the barrier is, and it’s not that scary than I thought. I’d be gonna have a look and approach various exciting projects in the Cloud Native world.

Conclusion

Not to mention, you could do what I mentioned in this article without even participating in GSoC. However, for those who are interested in OSS development but not able to make up own mind to take the first step like me, because you can get the opportunity to get started even if it would be accepted or not, I make a strong recommendation to try to get into GSoC.