I’m incredibly excited to share that I’ve been selected for Google Summer of Code 2026 (
@Google) under SW360, an Eclipse Foundation (
@EclipseFdn) project.
I first heard about GSoC in my first year of college but never really explored open source contributions seriously. That changed during one of my internship tasks, where I had to go through the KEDA (
github.com/kedacore/keda) documentation. I noticed a small gap in the roadmap.md that hadn’t been updated. It was a minor change, so I thought, why not contribute and fix it myself? That became my entry point into open source.
What stood out immediately was the realization that I could contribute to real, customer-impacting software without being part of the organization, and that the workflow felt very much like enterprise-level development. That experience pushed me to explore open source more deeply.
Since my strongest area is Spring Boot (Java), I started looking through GSoC organizations with Java-based codebases. I came across several strong projects like Jenkins, SonarQube, and Keycloak before deciding where to contribute. Eclipse SW360 stood out because it sits under the Eclipse Foundation, and the project is focused enough that a newcomer can still understand the full stack and architecture.
I began reading the documentation and setting up the codebase in January, which took significant time and effort due to outdated docs at the time. The documentation has since been greatly improved : ) I made my first contribution in February and have been consistently building on that since. Over time, I’ve contributed fixes for multiple small bugs across the repository, identified a major security vulnerability, improved exception handling, resolved some concurrency issues, and migrated parts of the codebase to more modern Spring Boot practices.
Given that this was the first time I was applying and the quality of contributions from others in the org was excellent, I did not have very high expectations of getting selected. But things worked out. The project I applied for was allocated a slot by Google, and I am grateful for the opportunity.
A big thank you to all the mentors at SW360, especially
@GMishx, for their time, feedback on my PRs and proposal, and for guiding me whenever I was off track. I am looking forward to contributing even more.
I would also like to thank my current team at
@ruckusnetworks, where working with open source technologies daily played a big role in shaping this journey.
To briefly describe my GSoC project, I will be working on migrating inter-service communication by removing Apache Thrift (
@TheASF) and replacing it with modern direct Spring service calls. There is much more to it, but that is the high-level idea. (
summerofcode.withgoogle.com/…)
More excited than ever to be in this field!