Hey everyone! I’m Lukhsaan, a third-year Software Engineering co-op student at McMaster University. Excited to be here - I’m planning to apply for GSoC 2026 with Jenkins, specifically focusing on the Contributor Spotlight and Website Success Stories retool projects, with the Plugin Modernization project also on my radar.
These caught my eye immediately because Vite + React + TypeScript is basically my day-to-day stack. I’ve built and deployed multiple production websites with exactly that combo - including sites for McMaster’s Mars Rover Team, the Software Engineering Society, the CALE 2026 conference, and a real-time environmental dashboard for a university research lab. I’m also comfortable with accessibility and responsiveness improvements, having resolved production accessibility issues at RBC across 30+ screens.
I actually recognized the Success Stories project from last year’s GSoC - I came across it while doing research at the time, so seeing it back again is a bit of a throwback. Glad it’s getting another shot this year and I’d love to be the one to finally get it across the finish line if given the opportunity.
I’ve already started digging into the Contributor Spotlight codebase and have a rough sense of the current architecture - the site is fully static, contributor data lives in AsciiDoc files, and GraphQL is really only there because of Gatsby’s data layer. My thinking for the migration would be to drop the GraphQL layer entirely when moving to Vite + React, convert the AsciiDoc data to structured JSON at build time, and preserve the existing URL structure, static output, and CI/CD workflow throughout. I’d want to tackle it in phases - functional parity first, then the UI/UX redesign and accessibility pass, then performance and documentation. Before locking in a proposal though I’d love to confirm a few things with the mentors, like whether AsciiDoc needs to stay as the canonical data source and whether there are any hard SEO or permalink constraints.
For the Plugin Modernization project - I’m genuinely interested in that one too and would love to start planning it out if anyone has pointers on where to begin there.
On the proposal side: Kris Stern, I noticed you mentioned a Google Form link for preliminary feedback - any idea when that’ll be available? Would love to get early eyes on my proposal direction as I’m contributing. I hope to keep in touch iteratively as I start creating some PR’s while getting familiar with the codebase.
Feel free to check me out!