GSoC 2021 @ mlpack, Acceptance & Community Bonding
Introduction
I’m David Port Louis, junior year student majoring in CS at Sri Manakula Vinayagar Engineering College, Puducherry . I was selected for GSoC 2021 to contribute to the Open Source Organization “mlpack”. mlpack is a fast & flexible machine learning library written in C++. I’ll be working on the Example Zoo, which I’ll explain in a jiffy.
Pre-GSoC Period
After the announcement of organizations, I began to skim through the list for organizations that were interested in Machine Learning, that’s when mlpack caught my eye. I thought that contributing to mlpack would enable me to put into practice what I have learnt. mlpack had a list of Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2021 and on the very top of the list was Example Zoo which was very appealing to me.
Example Zoo
“Libraries are like LEGO kits, only pre-assembled. If one needs to understand it, then one should interact with it”
“In zoo a visitor might be able to find almost every possible wildlife in that habitat” following this analogy “Example Zoo showcases the potential usage of most algorithms provided by mlpack, by applying them to interesting datasets”. This would help a new comer to pick up and play with the library quickly rather than skimming through documentation. This idea was mind boggling to me, so I curated a list of algorithms and datasets to showcase in the Zoo for my proposal
Application Period
During this period, I begin to work on my proposal and I showcased the use of various algorithms using the curated datasets. My mentors and other community members were extremely helpful by reviewing my proposal and I inculcated as many examples as I could. In my proposal, I included as much information and implementation details about each example with a comfortable timeline to keep up with.
I started to setup local development environment, get to know about best practices, coding guidelines and made my self familiar with the code base. I also contributed an example on using Linear Regression to predict salary
Proposal Accepted
On the day of result announcement, I was not sure about my acceptance. I was extremely nervous and refreshed my inbox every 15 minutes. Finally I didn’t receive any mail on 17th May till 22:00 IST, so I went to bed thinking, It’s OK the application process itself was pretty amazing and I learnt a lot during the period, maybe I’ll try next time. On 18th May, I woke up at 01:15 IST my phone was grayed out because of Digital Well being, Hoping for some miracle I paused my sleep time, refreshed mail and to my surprise I found a mail quoting “Welcome to GSoC 2021” and ended up releasing a sigh of relief. I was happy that my efforts came fruitful.
I was also extremely lucky to have two amazing mentors Marcus Edel and Kartik Dutt who were extremely helpful throughout the application process.
Community Bonding
Community bonding period kicked off with an amazing meet, where our org admin gave an overview about mlpack, the community and some tips for succeeding. Finally everyone began to introduce themselves. During this period
Also during this period I worked on the linear regression model to predict salary and made my first PR, hopefully I’ll make a separate blog on this one.
I would like to wrap up by thanking mentors, community members, friends and all other for their help from reviewing my proposal to correcting grammar mistakes. I would also like to thank my org admin, mentors and Google Open Source for this amazing opportunity. I’ll be posting a weekly update regarding my progress here
