How I got into GSoC 2018

As I was in grad school, I had an assignment in one of the classes. That assignment was to write a research essay about the history of some technology that I considered interesting. After careful consideration, I chose Processing as one of the technologies that I’d like to learn about, specifically about its history.

I set out to dig deep into the roots of Processing, finding out who was involved in creating it, who was contributing, what other technologies served as a predecessor to Processing and after three days of intensive research I was able to write an essay titled “The History of Processing”.

You can read my essay here: The History of Processing

Shortly after publishing, the essay made rounds around the web:

While working on the essay, I discovered that Processing was a participant in Google Summer of Code for a few years and that peaked my interest. I started looking at the website that lists project ideas that would be a good candidate for GSoC 2018 and found out that help is needed for Raspberry Pi related content and developing a website. These are my strengths, so I applied with this proposal, which got accepted:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SShi0Rjh6jHl6s_BIB5TBxKEygU1Knr5GQ1pwikIji8/edit

Before GSoC officially started, I was able to do some user research to understand the needs and the frustrations of people that are looking for the type of content that I wanted to produce.

You can see more about the process at the process page