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What is GSoC?

Google Summer of Code is a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors.

GNOME Foundation :

GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME project. The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is composed entirely of free software.

Source: Wikipedia

About Me:

Hello Everyone 🙂, 
I am Sriyansh Shivam 
 2023 GSoC Intern @ GNOME Foundation
 Sophomore pursuing Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering from Bharati Vidyapeeth ( Deemed University ) College of Engineering , Pune🧑🏻🎓 
 Focused on practicing DSA (Python) and building cool projects 📘
 Inclined towards Web Development 🌐 and UI UX 🖱
 Completed 14+ certifications and over 20+ projects 🎓
 Experience of 6+ languages and comfortable working on both Windows and      Linux 💻
 Open Source Contributor and Technical Writer 
 When not working, you could find me playing video games 🎮 or listening to songs 🎶

My Journey so Far :

My participation in Hacktoberfest 2022 marked the start of my open-source journey. I contributed to several Web development projects. Made no code and low code contributions. I learned how the Git process works, how you make a PR, sometimes receive review and changes requests on your commit, and then your commit gets merged after implementing those changes. I learned about git branching and much more. I heard about Google Summer of Code after discovering the open-source community. Despite having used Git for almost a year, I began using it much more regularly after Hacktoberfest. I started learning more about open source by watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, and enhancing my open-source project-contributing abilities. I occasionally use GitHub to learn about new technologies and to improve my coding abilities by using it as a reference.

In February, I found the Workbench project and immediately contacted my mentor and became the first GSoC applicant to begin working on it. At first, I had a lot of challenges, like installing Linux and learning new technologies, but with the help of my mentor's continuous encouragement, I was able to get past those challenges. I continued to research the project, made my first PR, got feedback, and implemented changes. On Element, I discovered the GNOME community and interacted with my mentors, asked doubts and got involved in discussions related to the project. Working on this project not only taught me new skills, but also taught me about GJS, GLib, and other technologies, I am learning and developing not only as a contributor but as well as an individual developer.

When I was in my freshman year, I remember watching tonnes of tutorials on YouTube and LinkedIn posts about how people cracked GSoC and the great experience they had, and getting accepted into this program the following year is nothing but a dream come true for me. I feel honored to be interning at GNOME.

My Project :

I would be working on Workbench to create demos and also implement functionalities that help ease the development workflow. Below are more specific details about the project.

About Workbench:

Learn and prototype with GNOME technologies

Workbench's goal is to let you experiment with GNOME technologies, no matter if tinkering for the first time or building and testing a GTK user interface.

Among other things, Workbench comes with

• real-time GTK/CSS preview

• library of examples

• JavaScript and Vala support

• XML and Blueprint for describing user interface

• syntax highlighting, undo/redo, autosave, session restore

• code linter and formatter

• terminal output

• 1000+ icons

Goal of my Project:

• Create beginner-friendly and easy-to-understand examples/demos for all widgets of GTK 4.10 and Libadwaita 1.3 to help newcomers understand how to use them effectively.

• Provide ready-to-use code snippets of the widgets/APIs covered, making it easier for developers to integrate them into their projects.

• Cover GLib/GIO and Libportal APIs and create relevant examples to help developers understand how to use them in their applications

• Create demos while taking UI and UX design concepts into account to showcase how to make aesthetically pleasing and functional user interfaces.

• Cover GNOME HIG Patterns to ensure that the examples and demos follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, making them consistent with other GNOME applications and user-friendly for users

• Implement Search function in Workbench

• Implement the Keyboard-Shortcuts feature in Workbench to ease the development-workflow

This Project would be beneficial as :

• In showcasing GNOME platform capabilities.

• Providing an alternative to lengthy tutorials and dense API references.

• Providing quick and ready-to-use snippets for GNOME Developers.

• Helping on-board new developers into the community.

Project Details

Project Repository

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This year at Akademy, I took the plunge and decided to run for a seat on the KDE e.V.’s board of directors.

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What is the KDE e.V.? It’s the nonprofit organization that represents the KDE community in legal and financial matters. It has several paid employees who work on KDE stuff, most notably promotion & marketing, project management, and event planning. You can see more at https://ev.kde.org/corporate/staffcontractors.

By the way, in case you were wondering (as I did at one point), “e.V.” is short for “eingetragener Verein” which is German for “registered association”–basically a type of nonprofit entity.

For several years, I’ve believed and publicly suggested that the KDE e.V. needs to have more technical positions. We need to directly hire KDE community members so they don’t have to seek employment with a 3rd-party company, or even drift away from the community when they have less free time and age into positions of greater financial need. In fact the KDE e.V. has already been moving in this direction, but slowly, because the available budget is pretty small compared to the vastness of the KDE community and the scope of more ambitious hiring. You can get an idea by looking at the report of the Financial Working Group in the 2021 annual report.

So I ran on a platform of hugely increasing both fundraising and technical hiring. And I’m honored to report that I won the election and am now a member of the board!

To those of you who voted for me, thank you so much for your support. For those of you who didn’t, I hope I can represent you well anyway, and if you get ticked off with anything I’m doing… please tell me! I welcome feedback. This position is all about being a good representative, and that’s what I want to be.

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So what does this mean?

It means that a majority of the KDE e.V. membership approves of these goals, so when it gets more money, the KDE e.V. has a mandate to do more hiring–especially for impactful technical positions. It means we will eventually be able to have the big names in KDE paid by KDE, so they can stay in KDE over the long haul! And it also means we need a lot more money to make this happen.

There are a lot of steps to this, including figuring out the legal technicalities of full-time hiring, and increasing the budget so we can make sure we’re always offering market wages. We’ll be investigating potential ways to boost fundraising: hiring a professional fundraising director; applying for a lot more grants; having more explicit fundraising campaigns; gamifying fundraising; sending out nudgey newsletters to people who have donated in the past; making it easier to donate on a recurring basis; and more.

But for now, if you want to see us do more hiring, the best way is to make a donation to the KDE e.V. at https://kde.org/community/donations. It helps. It really does! This money is going to transform KDE into a professional powerhouse with its own internally-employed cadre of world-class superstars. We’re going to take on the Big Tech dogs and win, and we’re going to let our heavy-hitters make a living within KDE while doing it. But it can’t happen without your help, so please consider making a donation today!

Things are heating up for the SAT competition 2016. I will of course compete. However, I would publicly like to ask the organisers to please for the love of whatever you believe in, please randomise the benchmarks. Just a tiny, little bit. It’s ridiculous that people are tuning their solvers so they can solve some […]