I’m so grateful to be accepted for this year Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a student with Systers Open Source community. The results were out April 23rd, and I couldn’t be more excited for this opportunity.

I started engaging with Systers community in the beginning of March. At first it was really intimidating speaking in an open source community, like every message of mine was a broadcast to a crowd of people, but with time I started getting more comfortable to speak out and asking questions. I really like how the community takes the code of conduct very seriously and promotes a welcoming environment for everyone. I already learned a lot from the application phase. One of the things that I learned is that we can help open source communities with more than code. Soon I’ll share in a blog post the application process.

For this edition of GSoC, I decided to propose a new idea that would benefit the Systers community and that would allow me to explore more of Android development. I proposed Systers Mentorship System, an application to match women to help each other. The project goal is to create mentorship relations with a pre-established period of time, in which the mentor volunteers their time to help the mentee in some career growth related topic. This mentorship does not need to be about technical topics, but about those other aspects of a career in tech, such as blogging, public speaking, interviews, etc. I think this can really help new women that are new to the industry, and aren’t sure of how to navigate it.

You can see more details from my initial proposal for the idea which has: initial proposed timeline for this summer, the app requirements, an overview of the data model and initial mock screens. Soon I’ll make some posts providing more insights about the proposal for the Mentorship System.

This summer I’ll be developing the back-end and the initial version of the mobile application (Android version), with the guiding of my mentors.

I’ll have two mentors, Dilushi Piumwardane and Murad and a project manager, Maybellin Burgos.

These project will be completely open source, so anyone can give suggestions and be a part of it. You can join the Systers Open Source Slack community. Here are the main Github repositories I’ll be working with: systers/mentorship-backend and systers/mentorship-android.

I’m very excited for this experience and looking forward to learn from my mentors, the project manager, my fellow GSoC students and open source community.

During the summer I’ll be documenting my journey in Isabel Costa GSoC Medium publication. I already have a few posts in the pipeline ;)

This is also posted on Medium.

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