GSoC 2026 with DBpedia: The Whole Journey, and Advice for Next Year

Hello there! I will be sharing my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026 experience with DBpedia in this post and also would like to share my insights and tips for all the students who are aiming for GSoC 2027.

The Backstory

Let’s take it a little back, it was September 2023, and it was my first year of college. I used to watch a lot of YouTube videos about the opportunities I should be targeting as an engineering student. And that is when I got to know about GSoC! I watched the video of Shradha Khapra ma’am and I was like, damn! This is huge. I researched more about it, watched more videos about how to actually get selected in GSoC.

I saw the official website of GSoC, I saw the list of contributors and their projects in the GSoC 2022 program.

And that is when I promised to myself, that my name will also be here someday 🫠

That version of Nakul would be so proud rn..haha!😌

The “Aha” Moment!

It was a random day in January 2026, 7th January to be precise, evening time and I was just sitting in my hostel room staring at the screen of my Mac. I was looking at a project of mine, and I was trying to think of the ways I can improve it. And then a thought randomly popped in my head, wait isn’t this January?! GSoC should be right around the corner!!

This literally came out of nowhere! And I immediately opened a new tab in my browser and opened the GSoC website and saw the timeline. I got to know that contributors have to submit their proposals in March, and the program starts in May. So from January to March, contributors have to contribute to the projects of any organisation of their choice and interact with the mentors of that project.

And I realised, if I start contributing now then by March I should have good enough contributions to get selected.

Locking in DBpedia (One of my better life decisions)

One of the most important things for GSoC selection is starting early, so that you can do enough work that’s required to take you through, and the mentors of the organisation you selected can get familiar with you and start recognising you.

So the next step for me was to pick the correct organisation, and that’s when DBpedia came into picture. While I found the projects of other organisations to be very hard and complex, I was able to understand what DBpedia actually do and I got really interested in their Neural Extraction project. I dug inside that project and went to its core, and that’s when I realised and said to myself, this is the project I’m going to work on! It matched my desired tech stack: AI/ML, Data Science and Python and I genuinely was able to understand the project and was trying to map out solutions I can build to improve it.

My contributions and proposal

And I locked in DBpedia and now it was time to go all in! I contributed for 2 months, made meaningful PRs and interacted with the mentors at the same time. I solely focussed on making meaningful PRs that actually solve a real bug. The validation point for me was when the project mentor Tommaso evaluated my whole PR and gave a full 7-8 point review on it and even suggested improvements to it. That was when I realised I’m going in the right direction and I’m doing something valuable, he didn’t do this for any other PR. This fuelled me up even more to keep going!

And on 22nd March I submitted my 37-page GSoC proposal. I mean I literally wrote a whole God damn book 😭

A standard GSoC proposal is like 20 pages, the reason for my 37-page proposal was that I literally went all in for one organisation, one project and one proposal, so I had to ensure I gave my absolute best in it!

It had the full details of my PRs, a prototype I built as a proof of work and my ideas for the summer, of how I could improve the project. I literally gave everything I had in these 3 months, every day of mine was just focussed around this. I couldn’t recognise myself, because the work I did in these 3 months really transformed me a lot! There were so many new things I learnt on the way.

The Waiting Game

And now it was a game of patience, results were to be announced on 1st May, and till then it’s suspense. I kept overthinking my chances, even doubting my own work. But at the same time there was a sense of calmness and assurance in my mind that I gave my absolute everything, I left no stone unturned and even if I didn’t get selected, the work that I did for this project till now and the skills I learnt, no one can take that away from me. The anxiety and overthinking were all over my head 😭

Days kept passing and it finally was the night of 30th April 2026, results were to be announced at 11:30 pm. And throughout the entire day I just kept thinking about this. I remember, when it was 11:20 pm, from then I started refreshing my inbox and the GSoC portal. It finally was 11:30, nothing popped up. It was 11:35, still nothing. I was kinda worried that maybe I’m not selected 😔

The Selection Mail and Celebrations 🥳

And then came a mail at 11:37 pm, “GSoC 2026: Congratulations, your proposal with DBpedia has been accepted!” 🥹🥳

My goodness!! My reaction was surprisingly very calm, that yeah I deserve it. You know throughout those days I just kept thinking if I get selected then how would I celebrate. But when the moment actually came, I was surprisingly very calm :))

I told my roommate about this, we both celebrated together. Our third roommate was half asleep, we woke him up and told him about this, and then all three of us celebrated and danced in the room! 😂

Then I called my parents to tell them about this, they were also very keenly waiting for this. They were happier than me after getting the news! 😌

Community Bonding period

I received a very warm welcome from the DBpedia community and my project mentors, we did a few introduction calls and I couldn’t wait to get started with the coding. The time came, 1st June 2026, we kicked off the project. I maintained the same sincerity here as well. I won’t get too much into the technical details of the project in this blog post, you can check out my weekly blogs where I’ve shared the progress of my project from start to end in depth. The thing I loved about my mentors: Tommaso Soru, Ara Yeroyan, Nandana and Mayank, was how patient and calm they were with me. At the beginning of the project, it wasn’t that easy and it was hard for me to figure out a few things. And they never made me feel dumb, they always supported me and actually “mentored” me. The thing I loved the most is that they won’t spoon-feed you, absolutely no hand holding, they will guide you and show you the direction and the rest you have to figure out yourself, you have to use your own brain.

Coding Period

I adapted very quickly, started working on the project and always tried to find ways to improve it. And by the end of the project, the results spoke for themselves! I beat the score of this project’s last year’s version with my model, and that too 3-4 times cheaper and faster computation. Better performance in all the metrics. This was the result of 3 months of consistency, my desire to keep improving and finding my own bugs and fixing them. Then I packaged everything and made it a ready-to-use model using Docker.

I passed the final submission! 😌

So grateful and thankful to my mentors, I mean I surely wouldn’t be here without their guidance.

And there are a few things that I would still be working on even after GSoC ends. Publishing the results and my full model in a research paper, I have been working on a branch of this project that hasn’t been done yet and it would be a big breakthrough when I do it and publish it eventually! And the other thing is still continuing to contribute to this project as a contributor. Open Source doesn’t just end with the GSoC final evaluation, the work should go on!

Post GSoC Gratitude 🙏

After GSoC completion, I finally found myself relaxing a little, with a lot of gratitude, that I got this opportunity and I was able to make the best of it. The things and skills I learnt this summer are really the things I value the most, and I know I wouldn’t be able to learn that much had I not been doing this GSoC project. Still a long way to go, but this really was a very important step in my journey, something I’ll always be proud of. Because very few people in the world can claim this, “I’m a GSoC Contributor”, and I’m so grateful to God that I am one of them.

Now this was my whole journey and experience of GSoC with DBpedia, a huge thanks to DBpedia for trusting me with this project and handing me this opportunity, I really hope I was able to add some value to this, and I will always continue to be a part of this project!

What I would say to those aiming for GSoC 2027

Now in the end I want to leave some advice for the students who are aiming for GSoC 2027, with the little experience I have and all the learnings I’ve had along the way.

Please look at GSoC as a great platform where you can contribute on several cool projects, and learn new things on the way, not just a medium where you earn a good stipend and get the worldwide recognition! I mean all of that is great, but the things that are always gonna stay with you are the learnings and the experience of contributing in open source.

Pick an organisation that actually matches your preferred tech stack and whose projects you actually understand.

Now start making “meaningful” contributions! I mean doing things like fixing a typo, or fixing the readme, or polishing a few lines in a code file and calling all of these as “contributions”, these are not gonna take you anywhere.

Go into the depth of the project of your choice and actually understand what underlying issues you can solve. Then pick one which looks solvable to you and work on that, this way you can make your first PR. And trust me, once you start doing this the addiction is real! There’s no going back. Keep making such contributions.

But there’s one thing that is even more important than this, and it is interacting with the mentors of your organisation! That’s the single most important thing. Why would they pick a guy with whom they are not familiar? Even if you have done the technical work, you have to speak it out loud. If you don’t do it, you might see someone else getting selected who probably hasn’t even done as many contributions as you.

Try to start early, the proposal submission window opens in March, don’t wait till February to start working. Start in November or December or at the latest by January, and then stay consistent till March, this alone puts you ahead of most fellow contributors.

And again, yes selection for the summer program is great but please don’t consider this as some sort of entrance exam or a race, this is a place to collaborate with other fellow contributors, learn, grow and contribute together, let it be like that only. Please don’t make it a competition. Always try to be helpful, interactive and collaborative, see if you can help any other contributor if they are stuck on anything. That’s all I have for now, I really hope any of these points help you in your GSoC journey.

My journey with this year’s GSoC comes to an end, but open source contributions don’t. I’ll still be associated with DBpedia and making contributions. Now with this year’s GSoC experience, I would try to help the new contributors to get familiar with the codebase and everything, simultaneously working on my project’s future work.

Cheers! 🥂