GSoC’21: The Beauty of Open Source

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on bringing student developers into open source software development. It is an initiative by Google to bridge the gap between student developers and open-source organizations to further extend the growth of the open-source community.

This year, 1,292 students from across the globe were accepted into Google Summer of Code!

Why Open Source?

One fine day while traversing through the commercial products we use daily, the term open source would appear into your world. Something free and people constantly working on it, how does that work, you may ask?

A simple reason would be that not everything can be solved or developed by just a group of people, while being made for the collective benefit of the society. Not just that, but the amount of resources required cannot be fulfilled at times. The best solution for this has been to open-source projects.

Open-sourced projects are open for your contributions, which are then reviewed by the maintainers and merged if found impactful. The best way to contribute is through platforms like GitHub.

While working on open-sourced projects, you develop great skills of working in a team, being patient and communicating with people while being technically and verbally sound.

The best thing about Open Source is the experience you earn of working on a real-time project with actual users and learn about the best practices followed in a production-ready code. You get to know how big organizations work and how code is deployed.

The joy of getting your PR merged into a project being used by thousands of users is priceless.

How I found MusicBrainz?

I stumbled upon the MusicBrainz Android App while surfing through the internet and found it interesting.

MusicBrainz is an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public. It is the ultimate source of music information by allowing anyone to contribute and releasing the data under open licenses. It’s the universal lingua franca for music by providing a reliable and unambiguous form of music identification, enabling both people and machines to have meaningful conversations about music.

Upon researching more, I explored the MetaBrainz Foundation Inc., which is a non-profit that believes in free, open access to data. It has been set up to build community maintained databases and make them available in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses.

They have some other mind-blowing projects ongoing as well with the likes of ListenBrainz, AcousticBrainz, Picard, CritiqueBrainz, and much more!

Thoughts so far?

I remember making my first PR around January, which was completely out of my love for the project. The project was so well made that I felt the urge to reach out and join the community by searching about them over the internet. An instant connection is what pumped me up.

After a while I found that the organization participates in GSoC, and hence decided to apply for the same. This project is what embarked my journey to Google Summer of Code. It will always reserve a special place for me.

Over the last few months, I have learnt a lot and gained an insightful experience, which I will always cherish. I will continue contributing towards this project even after the program ends.

I will be discussing the technical details of the project in another article soon.

Signing off!

It has been an exhilarating experience for me, right from submitting a proposal for GSoC to becoming a part of a fantastic community.

My mentor and the whole community at MetaBrainz have been Remarkable! Everyone is passionate about the work and efforts they put in. They are active in discussions and give proper feedback with precise guidance along the way.

The whole program is power-packed and allows you to understand the world of open-source and the people who work day-in and day-out developing such amazing technologies!

That’s it from my side for today. Stay tuned for further updates :)

Project: MusicBrainz App

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and check out my GitHub profile.