TL;DR;
Don’t give up if your GSoC proposal was not accepted. Find hereafter some tips to prepare for a successful GSoC 2023 application.
The 2022 GSoC edition reached an important milestone. Google published the names of the selected contributors. For them, the heavy lifting starts now.
I want to take this opportunity to thank all participants for their time and dedication. But as often in life, not everyone can be selected.
To those that didn’t make it into the 2022 edition, my message is “don’t give up”. Rather, reflect on what you can do to have a stronger proposal for the next GSoC edition.
A common proposal weakness was the lack of enough substance or depth. Mentors couldn’t judge whether the candidate understood the problem to solve. These proposals didn’t articulate the solution well. They didn’t convey the message that the candidate would deliver effective results.
A good way to actively prepare for the next GSoC season is to:
- Follow the various public GSoC events like the mid- and end-term presentations & demos.
- Improve your knowledge of Jenkins and its ecosystems. Install an instance (local, shared school resources, cloud free tier) and use it actively. Enable Continuous Integration (CI) for your school or hobby projects. Improve your skills to write declarative pipelines. This will not only be useful for a future Jenkins GSoC application but also for your future IT practitioner’s career.
- Learn about the Jenkins Community and how it works. Follow or even participate in the various SIGs. Hangout in the various Community communication channels (gitter, mailing list, https://community.jenkins.io)
- Get familiar with the Pull Request process used by the Jenkins community and improve your knowledge of Git. Check out the various recordings made by the Jenkins Community on this subject.
A good start are some documentation updates: they are very useful (and often forgotten). The risk of breaking something or not understanding the (sometimes overwhelming) machinery/framework is limited. - Search for newbie friendly issues in plugins. Best is to concentrate on plugins or functionalities that are important to you and you use regularly. Clearly explain what you intended to do in your PR and request guidance or explanation to the maintainer or the fellow developers. Sometimes they have little time or assume pre-existent knowledge. Don’t hesitate to ask if you have doubts.
- Read again and carefully the recommendations for GSoC Contributors at Google Summer of Code. Information for GSoC Contributors
If there is interest, we can arrange an on-line meeting where these recommendations could be discussed.
/- Jmm
(for the Jenkins GSoC Org Admin team)