zulip/docs/outreach/gsoc.md

# GSoC project ideas

This page describes ideas you can use as a starting point for your project
proposal. If you have not done so yet, you should **start by reading our [guide on
how to apply](./apply.md)** to a Zulip outreach program. As noted in the guide:

> Your first priority during the contribution period should be figuring out how
> to become an effective Zulip contributor. Start developing your project proposal
> only once you have experience with iterating on your PRs to get them ready for
> integration. That way, you'll have a much better idea of what you want to work
> on and how much you can accomplish.

## Project size and difficulty

GSoC offers two project size options: 175 hours and 350 hours. We have
designed all our projects to have incremental milestones that can be
completed throughout the program. Consequently, all Zulip projects
described below are compatible with either project size. Of course,
the amount of progress you will be expected to make depends on whether
you are doing a 175-hour or 350-hour project.

We don't believe in labeling projects by difficulty, because the level of
difficulty is highly dependent on your particular skills. To help you find
a great project, we list the skills needed, and try to emphasize where strong
skills with particular tools are likely to be important for a given project.

## Focus areas

For 2022, we are particularly interested in GSoC contributors who have
strong skills at visual design, HTML/CSS, mobile development, full
stack feature development, performance optimization, or Electron. So
if you're an applicant with those skills and are looking for an
organization to join, we'd love to talk to you!

The Zulip project has a huge surface area, so even when we're focused
on something, a large amount of essential work goes into other parts of
the project. Every area of Zulip could benefit from the work of a
contributor with strong programming skills, so don't feel discouraged if
the areas mentioned above are not your main strength.

## Project ideas by area

This section contains the seeds of project ideas; you will need to do research
on the Zulip codebase, read issues on GitHub, and talk with developers to put
together a complete project proposal. It's also fine to come up with your own
project ideas. As you'll see below, you can put together a great project around
one of the [area labels](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels) on GitHub; each
has a cluster of problems in one part of the Zulip project that we'd love to
improve.

**Note: The project ideas on this page are from summer 2022.** In the future, we
will update them with details for 2023. You can expect the updated list to look
similar to what you'll find below.

### Full stack and web frontend focused projects

Code: [github.com/zulip/zulip -- Python, Django, JavaScript, and
CSS](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/).

- **Cluster of priority features**. Implement a cluster of new full
  stack features for Zulip. The [high priority
  label](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22priority%3A+high%22)
  documents hundreds of issues that we've identified as important to
  the project. A great project can be 3-5 significant features around
  a theme (often, but not necessarily, an [area
  label](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels); the goal will be to
  implement and get fully merged a cluster of features with a
  meaningful impact on the project. 175 or 350 hours; difficulty will
  vary. Experts and skills depend on the features; Tim Abbott will
  help you select an appropriate cluster once we've gotten to know you
  and your strengths through getting involved in the project.

- Zulip's [REST API documentation](https://zulip.com/api), which is an
  important resource for any organization integrating with Zulip.
  Zulip has a [nice framework](../documentation/api.md) for writing
  API documentation built by past GSoC students based on the OpenAPI
  standard with built-in automated tests of the data both the Python
  and curl examples. However, the documentation isn't yet what we're
  hoping for: there are a few dozen endpoints that are missing,
  several of which are quite important, the visual design isn't
  perfect (especially for e.g. `GET /events`), many template could be
  deleted with a bit of framework effort, etc. See the [API docs area
  label][api-docs-area] for many specific projects in the area. Our
  goal for the summer is for 1-2 students to resolve all open issues
  related to the REST API documentation. 175 or 350 hours; difficulty
  easy or medium. **Skill required**: Python programming. Expertise
  with reading documentation and English writing are valuable, and
  product thinking about the experience of using third-party APIs is
  very helpful. Expert: Lauryn Menard.

[api-docs-area]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22area%3A+documentation+%28api+and+integrations%29%22

- Implement important full-stack features for open source projects
  using Zulip, including [default stream
  groups](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13670) and
  improvements to the upcoming [public
  access](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/13172)
  feature. Experts: Tim Abbott, Aman Agrawal. Many of these issues
  have open PRs with substantial work towards the goal, but each of
  them is likely to have dozens of adjacent or follow-up tasks. 175 or
  350 hours; easy or medium. The most important skill for this work is
  carefully thinking through and verifying changes that affect
  multiple configurations.

- Fill in gaps, fix bugs, and improve the framework for Zulip's
  library of native integrations. We have about 120 native
  integrations, but there's more that would be valuable to add, and
  several extensions to the framework that would dramatically improve
  the user experience of using these, such as being able to do
  callbacks to third-party services like Stripe to display more
  user-friendly notifications. The [the integrations label on
  GitHub](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20integrations)
  lists some of the priorities here (many of which are great
  preparatory projects). 175 or 350 hours; medium difficulty with
  various possible difficult extensions. **Skills required**: Strong
  Python experience, will to install and do careful manual testing of
  third-party products. Fluent English, usability sense and/or
  technical writing skills are all pluses. Expert: Zixuan Li.

- Optimize performance and scalability, either for the web frontend or
  the server. Zulip is already one of the faster web apps out there,
  but there are a bunch of ideas for how to make it substantially
  faster. This is likely a particularly challenging project to do
  well, since there are a lot of subtle interactions to
  understand. 175 or 350 hours; difficult. **Skill recommended**:
  Strong debugging, communication, and code reading skills are most
  important here. JavaScript experience; some Python/Django
  experience, some skill with CSS, ideally experience using the Chrome
  Timeline profiling tools (but you can pick this up as you go) can be
  useful depending on what profiling shows. Our [backend scalability
  design doc](../subsystems/performance.md) and the [production issue
  label][prod-label] (where performance/scalability issues tend to be
  filed) may be helpful reading for the backend part of this. Experts:
  Steve Howell, Tim Abbott, Yash RE.

[prod-label]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22area%3A+production%22

- Extract JavaScript logic modules from the Zulip web app that we'd
  like to be able to share with the Zulip mobile app. This work can have
  big benefits it terms of avoiding code duplication for complex
  logic. We have prototyped for a few modules by migrating them to
  `static/shared/`; this project will involve closely collaborating
  with the mobile team to prioritize the modules to migrate. 175 or
  350 hours; difficult. **Skills recommended**: JavaScript experience,
  careful refactoring, API design, React.

  Experts: Greg Price, Austin Riba, Steve Howell.

- Make Zulip integrations easier for nontechnical users to set up.
  This includes adding a backend permissions system for managing bot
  permissions (and implementing the enforcement logic), adding an
  OAuth system for presenting those controls to users, as well as
  making the /integrations page UI have buttons to create a bot,
  rather than sending users to the administration page. 175 or 350
  hours; easy to difficult depending on scope. **Skills recommended**:
  Strong Python/Django; JavaScript, CSS, and design sense
  helpful. Understanding of implementing OAuth providers, e.g. having
  built a prototype with [the Django OAuth
  toolkit](https://django-oauth-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
  would be great to demonstrate as part of an application. The [Zulip
  integration writing guide](../documentation/integrations.md) and
  [integration documentation](https://zulip.com/integrations/) are
  useful materials for learning about how things currently work, and
  [the integrations label on
  GitHub](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20integrations)
  has a bunch of good starter issues to demonstrate your skills if
  you're interested in this area. Expert: Eeshan Garg.

- Extend Zulip's meta-integration that converts the Slack incoming
  webhook API to post messages into Zulip. Zulip has several dozen
  native integrations (https://zulip.com/integrations/), but Slack has
  a ton more. We should build an interface to make all of Slack’s
  numerous third-party integrations work with Zulip as well, by
  basically building a Zulip incoming webhook interface that accepts
  the Slack API (if you just put in a Zulip server URL as your "Slack
  server"). **Skills required**: Strong Python experience; experience
  with the Slack API a plus. Work should include documenting the
  system and advertising it. 175 or 350 hours; medium to
  difficult. Expert: Tim Abbott.

- Visual and user experience design work on the core Zulip web UI.
  We're particularly excited about students who are interested in
  making our CSS clean and readable as part of working on the UI; we
  are working on a major redesign and have a lot of plans that we
  believe will substantially improve the application but require care
  and determination to implement and integrate. 175 or 350 hours;
  medium to difficult. **Skills required**: Design, HTML and CSS
  skills; most important is the ability to carefully verify that one's
  changes are correct and will not break other parts of the app;
  design changes are very rewarding since they are highly user-facing,
  but that also means there is a higher bar for correctness and
  reviewability for one's work. A great application would include PRs
  making small, clean improvements to the Zulip UI (whether logged-in
  or logged-out pages). Experts: Aman Agrawal, Alya Abbott.

- Build support for outgoing webhooks and slash commands into Zulip to
  improve its chat-ops capabilities. There's an [old pull
  request](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/1393) with a lot of
  work on the outgoing webhooks piece of this feature that would need
  to be cleaned up and finished, and then we need to build support for
  slash commands, some example integrations, and a full set of
  documentation and tests. Recommended reading includes Slack's
  documentation for these features, the Zulip message sending code
  path, and the linked pull request. 175 or 350 hours; easy to
  medium. **Skills required**: Strong Python/Django skills. Expert:
  Steve Howell.

- Build a system for managing Zulip bots entirely on the web.
  Right now, there's a somewhat cumbersome process where you download
  the API bindings, create a bot with an API key, put it in
  configuration files, etc. We'd like to move to a model where a bot
  could easily progress from being a quick prototype to being a third-party extension to
  being built into Zulip. And then for built-in bots, one should be able to click a few
  buttons of configuration on the web to set them up and include them in
  your organization. We've developed a number of example bots
  in the [`zulip_bots`](https://github.com/zulip/python-zulip-api/tree/main/zulip_bots)
  PyPI package. 175 or 350 hours; medium difficulty.
  **Skills recommended**: Python and JavaScript/CSS, plus devops
  skills (Linux deployment, Docker, Puppet etc.) are all useful here.
  Experience writing tools using various popular APIs is helpful for
  being able to make good choices. Expert: Steve Howell.

- Improve the UI and visual design of the existing Zulip settings and
  administration pages while fixing bugs and adding new settings. The
  pages have improved a great deal during recent GSoCs, but because
  they have a ton of surface area, there's a lot to do. You can get a
  great sense of what needs to be done by playing with the
  settings/administration/streams overlays in a development
  environment. You can get experience working on the subsystem by
  working on some of [our open settings/admin
  issues][all-settings-issues]. 175
  to 350 hours; easy to medium. **Skills recommended**: JavaScript,
  HTML, CSS, and an eye for visual design. Expert: Sahil Batra.

  [all-settings-issues]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3A%22area%3A+settings+%28admin%2Forg%29%22%2C%22area%3A+settings+%28user%29%22%2C%22area%3A+stream+settings%22%2C%22area%3A+settings+UI%22

- Build out the administration pages for Zulip to add new permissions
  and other settings more features that will make Zulip better for
  larger organizations. We get constant requests for these kinds of
  features from Zulip users. The Zulip bug tracker has plentiful open
  issues( [settings
  (admin/org)](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20settings%20%28admin%2Forg%29),
  [settings
  UI](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20settings%20UI),
  [settings
  (user)](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20settings%20%28user%29),
  [stream
  settings](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20stream%20settings)
  ) in the space of improving the Zulip administrative UI. Many are
  little bite-size fixes in those pages, which are great for getting a
  feel for things, but a solid project here would be implementing
  several of the major missing features as full-stack development
  projects. A particular focus this summer will be extending most
  permissions settings to use a new groups-based model. 350 or 175
  hours; medium difficulty. **Skills recommended**: A good mix of
  Python/Django and HTML/CSS/JavaScript skill is ideal. The system for
  adding new features is [well
  documented](../tutorials/new-feature-tutorial.md). Expert: Sahil
  Batra.

- Work on Zulip's development and testing infrastructure. Zulip is a
  project that takes great pride in building great tools for
  development, but there's always more to do to make the experience
  delightful. Significantly, about 10% of Zulip's open issues are
  ideas for how to improve the project's contributor experience, and
  are [in](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20tooling)
  [these](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20testing-coverage)
  [four](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20testing-infrastructure)
  [labels](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20provision)
  for tooling improvements.

  This is a somewhat unusual project, in that it would likely consist
  of dozens of small improvements to the overall codebase, but this
  sort of work has a huge impact on the experience of other Zulip
  developers and thus the community as a whole (project leader Tim
  Abbott spends more time on the development experience than any other
  single area).

  A possible specific larger project in this space is working on
  adding [mypy](../testing/mypy.md) stubs
  for Django in mypy to make our type checking more powerful. Read
  [our mypy blog post](https://blog.zulip.org/2016/10/13/static-types-in-python-oh-mypy/)
  for details on how mypy works and is integrated into Zulip. This
  specific project is ideal for a strong contributor interested in
  type systems. See [this
  issue](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18777) for details on the
  current state of this work. 175 or 350 hours; difficult.

  **Skills required**: Python, some DevOps, and a passion for checking
  your work carefully. A strong applicant for this will have
  completed several projects in these areas.

  Experts: Anders Kaseorg (provision, testing), Steve Howell (tooling, testing).

- Port our JavaScript codebase to Typescript. Zulip is in the process
  of porting the main web app JavaScript codebase to TypeScript; at
  present we've done much of the necessary tooling setup, and about 5%
  of lines have been migrated (mostly in libraries used widely); the
  goal for this project will be to get that to more like 75%. Multiple
  students are possible; 175 and 350 hours; difficult. **Skills
  required**: TypeScript and refactoring expertise; we're specifically
  interested in students who are a type theory nerd and are invested
  in writing types precisely and checking their work
  carefully. Experts: Priyank Patel, Anders Kaseorg.

- Write more API client libraries in more languages, or improve the
  ones that already exist (in
  [python](https://github.com/zulip/python-zulip-api),
  [JavaScript](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-js),
  [PHP](https://packagist.org/packages/mrferos/zulip-php), and
  [Haskell](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hzulip)). The
  JavaScript bindings are a particularly high priority, since they are
  a project that hasn't gotten a lot of attention since being adopted
  from its original author, and we'd like to convert them to
  Typescript. 175 or 350 hours; medium difficulty. **Skills
  required**: Experience with the target language and API
  design. Expert: Depends on language.

### React Native mobile app

Code:
[React Native mobile app](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile).
Experts: Greg Price, Chris Bobbe.

The highest priority for the Zulip project overall is improving the
Zulip React Native mobile app.

- Work on issues and polish for the app. You can see the open issues
  [here](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues). There are a
  few hundred open issues across the project, and likely many more
  problems that nobody has found yet; in the short term, it needs
  polish, bug finding/squashing, and debugging. So browse the open
  issues, play with the app, and get involved! Goals include parity
  with the web app (in terms of what you can do), parity with Slack (in
  terms of the visuals), world-class scrolling and narrowing
  performance, and a great codebase.

A good project proposal here will bundle together a few focus areas
that you want to make really great (e.g. the message composing,
editing, and reacting experience), that you can work on over the
summer. We'd love to have multiple students working on this area if we
have enough strong applicants. 175 or 350 hours; medium to difficult.

**Skills required**: Strong programming experience, especially in
reading the documentation of unfamiliar projects and communicating
what you learned. JavaScript and React experience are great pluses,
as are iOS or Android development/design experience is useful as
well. You'll need to learn React Native as part of getting
involved. There's tons of good online tutorials, courses, etc.

### Electron desktop app

Code:
[Our cross-platform desktop app written in JavaScript on Electron](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop).
Experts: Anders Kaseorg, Akash Nimare, Abhighyan Khaund.

- Contribute to our [Electron-based desktop client
  application](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop). There's
  plenty of feature/UI work to do, but focus areas for us include
  things to (1) improve the release process for the app, using
  automated testing, TypeScript, etc. and (2) polish the UI. Browse
  the open issues and get involved! 175 or 350 hours. This is a
  difficult project because it is important user-facing code with good
  automated testing, so the bar for convincing others your work is
  correct is high.

**Skills required**: JavaScript experience, Electron experience. You
can learn electron as part of your application!

Good preparation for desktop app projects is to (1) try out the app
and see if you can find bugs or polish problems lacking open issues
and report them and (2) fix some polish issues in either the Electron
app or the Zulip web frontend (which is used by the electron app).

- Prototype a next generation Zulip desktop app implemented using the
  Tauri Rust-based framework. Tauri is a promising new project that we
  believe is likely a better technical direction for client
  applications than Electron for desktop apps for security and
  resource consumption reasons. The goal of this project would be to
  build a working prototype to evaluate to what extent Tauri is a
  viable platform for us to migrate the Zulip desktop app to. 350
  hours only; difficult. **Skill required**: Ability to learn quickly.

### Terminal app

Code: [Zulip Terminal](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal)
Experts: Aman Agrawal, Neil Pilgrim.

- Work on Zulip Terminal, the official terminal client for Zulip.
  zulip-terminal is already a basic usable client, but it needs a lot
  of work to approach the web app's quality level. We would be happy
  to accept multiple strong students to work on this project. Our goal
  for this summer is to improve its quality enough that we can upgrade
  it from an alpha to an advertised feature. 175 or 350 hours; medium
  difficulty. **Skills required**: Python 3 development skills, good
  communication and project management skills, good at reading code
  and testing.

### Archive tool

Code: [zulip-archive](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive)
Experts: Rein Zustand, Steve Howell

- Work on zulip-archive, which provides a Google-indexable read-only
  archive of Zulip conversations. The issue tracker for the project
  has a great set of introductory/small projects; the overall goal is
  to make the project super convenient to use for our OSS
  communities. 175 or 350 hours; medium difficulty.
  **Skills useful**: Python 3, reading feedback from users, CSS,
  GitHub Actions.