GSOC Reunion 2014 at US (a brief)


From where to start! 😛 It can take a life time, expressing how it feels when a Big dream of your life came true. 22 Oct, 2014 when our plane landed in San Francisco, US on the day of Diwali (a very important festival of Indian culture), after travelling thousands of miles from India, we reached in the city of dreams. A feeling was like someone will pinch me and this dream will break out. But, fortunately, everything was real. We were travelling on the roads of US and were about to meet the Great Developers from all over the world.

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But you must be thinking, how it happened! Lets have a flash back of the story. March 2014, It was time to choose a community and submit a proposal for a project according to your skills and interest for the contest named Google Summer of Code. I was just a beginner in programming but after making great efforts and with assistance of my teachers who suggested us to participate, I could able to submit my proposal for the project UI brushup of OpenSCAD. This project was about enhancing the user interface of OpenSCAD, a 3D CAD modeler, for the healthier experience of professional users. I had a great time working on this project with my mentors, Torsten Paul and Marius Kintel in my summer vacations. I learnt a lot of things while working with them. 🙂 It will always be a great pleasure to work with them again. Anyway, I was able to submit the project successfully at the end of the August and soon my college started with new semester. But before that, my inbox received an email of invitation for the GSOC 10th year Reunion at US. Everyone in my family and friends got very excited with this news. But I din’t have my passport and some other documents required for that ready and it was really very difficult to make those all ready in such a short time. So, after all, we got visa of US for 10 years, bought ticket and got ready to fly… 🙂

Now you got, how I reached US. Lets talk about the GSOC reunion events arranged by Google at hotel Marriott in San jose, California. It was basically aimed for socializing. Meeting the developers from all over the world whom you could see on line only and knowing about their projects and communities in their own way of presentation was seriously a great idea. Every person present there was ocean of new ideas and knowledge for us. You could know about a lot interesting and useful projects with just a few minutes talk while enjoying delicious meals on table.

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These talks were in the form of unconferences, sessions for discussion on some pre-suggested topics and presentations by some project mentors. Specifically I got chance to meet Christopher Sean Morrison, admin of my community, BRL-CAD but I missed my mentors :(. I hope to see them next time.

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We were also presented some goodies like t-shirts, hoody, pen, a book- Team Geek and a badge with our name and community written on it. All in all loved the arrangements.

Instead of all these, we also got to go Great America, an amusement park to enjoy rides with our newly made developer friends :).

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Visiting the Google office at Mountain view was a great experience. We got some beautiful clicks near different android version models and also bought gifts from Google store for our friends :).

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The best part of this visit at Google office  was to know about Google’s culture, how googlers work, how and where they spend their leisure time, how they take care of nature and what other facilities are available for them.

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I hope you’re happy with on going tour but the climax is about to come. Yes, the premier of the reunion was that evening at tech museum where we met our superstars, Linus Torvalds and Peter Norwig. They were surprise speakers. Every word from their speech was like direct blessing from God. It was hard to believe the reality of the situation but once again, fortunately it was Real! 🙂

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These four days were one of the most memorable days of my life. I was feeling so lucky being there in the hall full of developers. Learning so many things including different cultures of people from all over the world in such a short time was wonderful experience. I hope God has written more such delightful days in my life and wish to get a chance being there again 🙂

Thanks.


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