GSoC’21 Community Bonding period @CircuitVerse

Hi I am Devansh Dixit, 2nd year Undergrad from BITS PILANI, and this is my first blog talking about GSoC Community bonding period , what is expected and what I did.

You can check out my Pre-GSoC journey here.

To define this period, informally, it is the period when the feeling of getting selected for GSoC hasn’t sunk in yet, you are thanking your mentors, telling your relatives that “No! I am not interning at GOOGLE”, and you meet all these super talented and knowledgeable people who are equally modest and excited for the great summers ahead! (Formal explanation later)

Google Summer of Code is divided into 3 broad phases.

Phase 1 — The Community Bonding Period

Phase 2 — Coding Period 1 + First Evaluations (first 5 weeks)

Phase 3 — Coding Period 2 + Final Evaluations (next 5 weeks)

In this blog, I’ll be talking about Phase 1 of Google Summer of Code.

What is the Community Bonding period?

The day you see your name on GSoC’s website, marks the beginning of the Community Bonding Period. As a student, you receive official mails from Google regarding some formalities that you need to do and you might as well get welcome messages from your organization.

Every organization has people from various different cultures, regions, and a huge codebase to understand which will take some time. This is what the community bonding period is all about. In order to help the students before they get started working on their projects, Google gives them a month (20 days this year) to understand the organization, its codebase, meet the team, and be ready to code in the coding period.

What should you do in the community bonding period?

Here’s are a list of things you should ideally be doing to get a headstart in your community bonding period.

1. Set up your development environment.
2. Get familiar with the codebase (talking to mentors and seeing the documentation helps).
3. Start interacting with your project mentor and get clarity on your project plan and its deliverables.
4. GSoC is a really great opportunity to bond with other fellow GSoCers, mentors and make friends around the world! (Ayan biswas is a besite now XD).
5. Review your project plan and timeline.
6. If after doing all this, you have some time to spare, you can start coding too.

My Community Bonding Period experience

These were the things I did during my community bonding period:

1. Development environment setup: I used docker for windows (which had a lot of issues and took a lot of time) and was able to successfully set up my development environment. Here’s the link to the setup guide.
2. Revised Project plan: My mentors and I discussed the deliverables, the timeline, the project plan, and the ways to proceed.
3. Team building meetings: We had an all-team meeting in which the mentors talked about the history of org, what was their role in making CircuitVerse what it is today, other GSoC students gave their introductions and decided on meeting schedules and documentation methods.
4. Coding: I did the first 2 week’s work in the community bonding period itself, which is the data extraction and cleaning module for the dataset.

I also shifted from Mumbai to Delhi, got my laptop’s screen crashed, and also got vaccinated during my community bonding period but my mentors were kind enough to understand and gave me enough time to settle.

So this was my community bonding experience in GSoC’21 and I am really excited for the coding period ahead. Please follow and become a part of the journey!