The beginning of a journey with GNOME on Google Summer of Code

. 2 min read.

I'm so excited to announce that I'm being part of Summer of Code 2020 with GNOME!

In this post, I'll talk about my experience during the student application period.

Getting ready to dive in GSoC

Last year I've heard about the Google Summer of Code program, how it works, its benefits, and the kind of work done on the projects. But I didn't feel like I was able to participate, and eventually missed the opportunity.

This year though, I decided to create a proposal and submit it to an organization. I chose GNOME due to some reasons:

A supportive, kind community;
GNOME is my daily driver desktop environment since 2015 when I started my graduation in software engineering;
and I wanted to work on a JavaScript project.

That being said, when I was looking for a project to work on, this one immediately caught my attention: GNOME Shell: Notification Popover Redesign. It was JavaScript, which I was looking for, but also, it was GNOME Shell!

I could be part of a project that would impact the experience of thousands of other GNOME users with the notifications system.

Making my first contribution

After I chose to focus on this project, I reached the mentor of this project, Florian, who helped me to configure my environment. It took me a whole day to get it up and running (quite a beast, in his words), and then I was able to dive into the code.

In order to show the GNOME team that you can participate in a GSoC project, they require a small contribution to the code of the project you want to send a proposal to. I worked on a newcomers issue in the panel menu, to display the name of the Bluetooth device connected.

Considered an easy issue, it took me some time to understand the code and finally I managed to open my first pull request on Shell's codebase.

That made me feel comfortable(and confident) to look for more challenges in order to be more prepared for the project, in case I was chosen by the GNOME team to participate on GSoC.

The panel menu bluetooth now shows the device name

Selected to work with GNOME

I want to thank the GNOME team for choosing me!

I'm so excited to learn from you folks and help the community to grow. I believe this project will bring a great impact on the experience of using GNOME.

I also want to thank my mentor, Florian, for helping me out since our first contact, from setting up the environment, pointing me the most suitable issues, helping me with the code to spend hours "pairing" with me on a rebase.

I'm amazed by this opportunity!

Thank you all who supported me entering on this journey!