Hey there, I’m Swastik. I was just browsing through the new organizations that are appearing for the first time in GSoC, and landed on preCICE, read a little about it, and got excited to look more into it. One project that instantly grabbed my attention was the Error Message with Configuration Context. I looked more into the issue that this project is trying to solve, and the solution really makes sense to me. It would be really helpful for the users if implemented correctly.
Enough of the project, let me first answer the points that are mentioned here:
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So, to answer the first point honestly, it’s actually the “GSoC” label that’s valued a lot in India while applying for internships at startups. Being a GSoC mentee adds a lot of weight to your resume, and thus comes the competition with it, all trying to crack that “GSoC” label. I tried hard last year, got my proposal approved by the maintainers, they were happy with it, but not enough slots were provided by Google to that org, so I wasn’t able to “crack” it. Though I kept working and contributing since I genuinely loved the project and got familiar with the codebase, I was able to get a direct internship at that org
. Though this year I wasn’t as passionate as last year to crack it, until I landed on preCICE. The project that I mentioned above really excited me, and I want to be part of the solution to that problem. So this is the main reason I am deciding to “compete” again for that label (not much hope though!) -
Though this project lies in the “small” category (most students avoid this one, because of the lower stipend), I am most interested in it. The main reason is that it seems solvable to me, neither too tough nor too easy, but challenging enough, at the same time. I am comfortable working with C++, all thanks to my university curriculum, and one of my previous internships at KDE, where I worked with C++ and Qt. I have built preCICE from the source and have performed the entry test mentioned in the project. I’m able to see the errors related to the configuration file, and feels like more context would be very helpful to the end user. With “more context”, I meant telling it the exact location of the error in the file.
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I am currently placed as an FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) intern at an organization called Accuknox. Meanwhile, I am also in the last sem of my Master’s in Computer Science at JIIT, Noida. But this is pretty manageable to me. I can easily take out 3-4 hours from my day to work on the project. Since this is also a small project (90 hours), time allocation won’t be an issue, I can assure.
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I have a total of 5 internships on my resume (including the FDE one at Accuknox). But I would only highlight two of them, since they were totally open-source internships. I love contributing to awesome open-source projects whenever I can, and I’m also heavily involved in the OSS community; this is what led to those internships. One is working as a SoK’25 (Season of KDE) mentee. Each year, KDE organizes their own mentorship program known as SoK. So I was selected to work on their state-of-the-art open-sourced video editor “Kdenlive”. This internship mostly involved working with a huge C++ and Qt codebase. The other open-source internship on my resume is the 3-month summer internship at prefix.dev, where I mostly worked on enhancing Pixi, an open-sourced, next-gen, language-agnostic package manager, written in Rust
. I’ve been learning and working with Rust for a while. So as you can see, I am very fond of working with low-level languages, and the idea of getting to work on such software that uses these low-level languages always excites me. -
So, as I answered above, I have done two open-source internships already, so yeah, I’m pretty comfortable working with Git and GitHub.
This is my GitHub and LinkedIn, in case anyone’s interested after learning this much about me .
To wrap up, the technical challenge of this project perfectly aligns with my experience in low-level programming and my enthusiasm for building developer tools. I am fully committed to investing the time necessary to create an effective solution, and I look forward to working alongside the preCICE team on both the codebase and my upcoming proposal!