Recently, Google announced the students who got selected into different organizations in its Summer of Code Program 2021. I had applied my proposal to Rocket.Chat and I am very happy to tell you that now I am part of Rocket.Chat 😁.

Wait, What is Google Summer of Code?

Google Summer of Code (let's call it GSOC now) is an international program conducted by Google for university students to let them participate and contribute to Free and Open Source Software 👨‍💻. Each student, who has been selected, will build open-source software under the mentorship of those Open Source Software Organizations. Google also awards stipends 💰 those who successfully complete their projects in the duration of three and a half months.

Note: it is NOT an internship, but a chance to build and contribute to awesome open source projects around the world on which many people depend.

What is Rocket.Chat?

Rocket.Chat is the best free and open source chat platform for team communication. If you have not heard about Rocket.Chat, you can think about it like Slack. (Please visit rocket.chat website. You will understand why I said the best). Unlike Slack, Rocket.Chat is open source and self-hosted 🚀.

One thing that it focuses on greatly is PRIVACY and SECURITY. It is so secure that not even those who have created Rocket.Chat will be able to retrieve any information about a running Rocket.Chat instance. You are the boss of your server!

Okay, Got it. What will you be working on?

I will be working on integrating a feature - Out of Office Responder with an Assigning Deputy into the Rocket.Chat codebase. Don't worry, it's just a long name 😆. I will explain what it actually means.

You can compare it with the Vacation Responder in Gmail. The Out of Office or the Vacation Responder sends an automatic reply message to every email which comes to you while it's on. The reply message can be customized by you. You may provide your colleague's contact email and some other instructions to let people know what they need to do as you are away.

Now, Rocket.Chat was lacking such a feature. The problem users faced was there was no effective way to let their team know once someone goes in a vacation or is on a medical leave. Rocket.Chat users always wanted this feature until it came to GSOC 2021 and Rocket.Chat will be the FIRST chat platform to integrate it.

Sounds cool, right? Wait, there's more.

Rocket.Chat went a step further with this idea. They also wanted to integrate an assigning deputy. The assigning deputy will take over the job of user who goes Out of Office. You can imagine it like asking a colleague to help certain the team while you are away. Besides the automatic reply, there will also be options to schedule the starting date and the returning date. All of these features bundled under one heading - Out of Office.

Why did you want to do GSOC?

Honestly, I did not want to do GSOC for the stipend or just because it is Google. I wanted to do it because I wanted to learn under mentorship of an Open Source organization and grow my skills. I had decided to utilize my summer into something useful. I was also looking for a chance to apply all that I had learnt up till then.

The reasons behind me choosing Rocket.Chat are multiple. First, Rocket.Chat is one of the most popular free open source project with more than 30K stars in it main repository on GitHub. I took it as a chance to make contributions into something valuable and I would be writing real production code. Second, as there are many users around the world who are dependent on Rocket.Chat for their communication, it would make me feel proud to have something written by me used by many users across the world. And the last reason was, I had developed most of my projects with JavaScript and it was the language in which Rocket.Chat was written in. So, I could extend my knowledge and skills in JavaScript.

Tell me more

Now, you might have some of these questions in mind now:

• How did your proposal get selected in Google Summer of Code?
• How did you interact with the community members?
• What was your first pull request to Rocket.Chat?
• I am beginner. Can I become a contributor next year?
• How can I get selected next year?
• And the list goes on....

Don't worry. I will discuss and describe each of the above question. 😇 I am going to write more posts like this one in this series.

You might find this series useful

I had made up mind that after getting selected in GSOC 2021, I am going to write articles on Hashnode. I wanted to help those who are new to Open Source and want to be a part of GSOC next year. You will not make the mistakes that I had made before my proposal got accepted.

If you want to contribute to open source organizations next year by getting selected in GSOC, you would will find this series useful. I will be breaking down my proposal writing, getting feedback from the community members, interacting with community members, interacting with other GSOC fellows in your organization, how to work on an issue and make a pull request.

While preparing myself for GSOC, there were articles on the internet which were really good. But, there were some important points which were missing. Not all of those things could be covered in a single blog (otherwise it would be very boring 😂).

Thank you

Thank you for reading this article!

You can follow me here on Hashnode if you would like to get notified about the incoming articles this series of mine.

If you have any questions or if you would like me to write an article on a specific topic, please do not hesitate to write them down in comments below. I try to reply to every comment as soon as possible.