How did it end?

To be honest, the experience was different than I expected. It was a lot of struggle to understand the codebase. The feature in itself was not too complex but understanding the code to a point where I made substantial progress did take a lot of time and effort.

With most real-world large projects, the outcome (the lines of code) produced at the end doesn’t depict an accurate picture of the hours a developer spent behind the scenes. But that’s with most creative jobs, I guess.

In the end, I am glad I was able to complete it. Seeing the feature work did make it up.

You can find my final report in a GitHub gist

• Final GSoC report 2022

If you are interested in how I understood the codebase, you can see

• Understanding the codebase

Should you contribute to open source?

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a good product. Just try to edit your home or your neighborhood or any place you like using iD editor; you’ll realize what I mean. If not for open source, OSM wouldn’t exist.

If you are thinking of becoming part of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in the future or know someone who can be or wants to be a part of GSoC or just wants to contribute to OSM or any open source project, I recommend it.