zulip/docs/overview/gsoc-ideas.md

```eval_rst
:orphan:
```

# Google Summer of Code

Zulip has been a GSoC mentoring organization since 2016, and we
generally have 10-15 GSoC students each summer, depending on how many
high-quality applications we receive.  We have some of the highest
standards of any GSoC organization; successful applications generally
have dozens of commits integrated into Zulip or other open source
projects by the time we review their application.  See
[our contributing guide](../overview/contributing.md) for details on
getting involved.

## About us

[Zulip](https://zulipchat.com) is a powerful, open source team chat
application. The core web app is written in Python and uses the Django
framework. We also make a cross-platform mobile app for iOS and
Android, a cross-platform desktop app, and over 100 native
integrations, all open source.

Zulip has gained a considerable amount of traction since it was
[released as open source software][oss-release] in late 2015, with
code contributions from [over 500 people](https://zulipchat.com/team)
from all around the world.  Thousands of people use Zulip every single
day, and your work on Zulip will have impact on the daily experiences
of a huge and rapidly growing number of people.

[oss-release]: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2015/09/open-sourcing-zulip-a-dropbox-hack-week-project/

As an organization, we value high-quality mentorship and making sure
our product quality is extremely high -- you can expect to learn a lot
from disciplined code reviews by highly experienced engineers. Since
Zulip is a team chat product, your GSoC experience with the Zulip
project will be highly interactive, with a real focus on teaching you
the concepts and reasoning behind how Zulip is engineered and how to
make it better.

As part of that commitment, Zulip has over 130,000 words of
[documentation for developers](../index.html#welcome-to-the-zulip-documentation), much of it designed to explain
not just how Zulip works, but why Zulip works the way that it does.

Zulip participated in GSoC 2016 and mentored three successful students
officially (plus 4 more who did their proposed projects unofficially).
We had 14 (+3) students in 2017 and we had 10 (+3) students in 2018.
We've also mentored five Outreachy interns and hundreds of Google
Code-In participants (several of who are major contributors to the
project today).

### Expectations for GSoC students

[Our guide for having a great summer with Zulip](../contributing/summer-with-zulip.md)
is focused on what one should know once doing a summer project with
Zulip.  But it has a lot of useful advice on how we expect students to
interact, above and beyond what is discussed in Google's materials.

[What makes a great Zulip contributor](../overview/contributing.html#what-makes-a-great-zulip-contributor)
also has some helpful information on what we look for during the application
process.

We also recommend reviewing
[the official GSoC resources](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/resources/)
-- especially
[the student manual](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/resources/manual).

Finally, keep your eye on
[the GSoC timeline](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline). The
student application deadline is April 9, 2019.

## Getting started

We have an easy-to-setup development environment, and a library of
tasks that are great for first-time contributors. Use
[our first-time Zulip developer guide](../overview/contributing.html#your-first-codebase-contribution)
to get your Zulip development environment set up and to find your first issue. If you have any
trouble, please speak up in
[#GSoC](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/14-GSoC) on
[the Zulip development community server](../contributing/chat-zulip-org.md)
(use your name as the topic).

## Application tips, and how to be a strong candidate

You'll be following
[GSoC's application process instructions](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/). And
we'll be asking you to make at least one successful pull request
before the application deadline, to help us assess you as a developer.
Students who we accept generally have 5 or more pull requests merged
or nearly merged (usually including at least a couple that are
significant, e.g. having 100+ lines of changes or that shows you have
done significant debugging).

Getting started earlier is better, so you have more time to learn,
make contributions, and make a good proposal.

Your application should include the following:

* Details on any experience you have related to the technologies that
  Zulip has, or related to our product approach.
* Links to materials to help us evaluate your level of experience and
  how you work, such as personal projects of yours, including any
  existing open source or open culture contributions you've made and
  any bug reports you've submitted to open source projects.
* Some notes on what you are hoping to get out of your twelve-week project.
* A description of the project you'd like to do, and why you're
  excited about it.
* Some notes on why you're excited about working on Zulip.
* A link to the initial contribution(s) you did.

We expect applicants to either have experience with the technologies
relevant to their project or have strong general programming
experience.  We also expect applicants to be excited about learning
how to do disciplined, professional software engineering, where they
can demonstrate through reasoning and automated tests that their code
is correct.

While only one contribution is required to be considered for the
program, we find that the strongest applicants make multiple
contributions throughout the application process, including after the
application deadline.

We are more interested in candidates if we see them submitting good
contributions to Zulip projects, helping other applicants on GitHub
and on
[chat.zulip.org](../contributing/chat-zulip-org.md),
learning from our suggestions,
[trying to solve their own obstacles and then asking well-formed
questions](https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/10/you-must-try-and-then-you-must-ask.html),
and developing and sharing project ideas and project proposals that
are plausible and useful.

Also, you're going to find that people give you links to pages that
answer your questions. Here's how that often works:

1. you [try to solve your problem until you get stuck, including
looking through our code and our documentation, then start formulating
your request for
help](https://blogs.akamai.com/2013/10/you-must-try-and-then-you-must-ask.html)
1. you ask your question
1. someone directs you to a document
1. you go read that document, and try to use it to answer your question
1. you find you are confused about a new thing
1. you ask another question
1. now that you have demonstrated that you have the ability to read,
think, and learn new things, someone has a longer talk with you to
answer your new specific question
1. you and the other person collaborate to improve the document that you
read in step 3 :-)

This helps us make a balance between person-to-person discussion and
documentation that everyone can read, so we save time answering common
questions but also get everyone the personal help they need. This will
help you understand the rhythm of help we provide in the developers'
Zulip livechat -- including why we prefer to give you help in public
mailing lists and Zulip streams, instead of in one-on-one private
messages or email. We prefer to hear from you and respond to you in
public places so more people have a chance to answer the question, and
to see and benefit from the answer. [More about that in this blog
post.](https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2016/10/12/0)

## Mentors

We have more than a dozen Zulip contributors who are interested in
mentoring projects.  We usually decide which contributors are
mentoring which projects based in part on who is a good fit for the
needs of each student as well as technical expertise.  You can reach
us via [#GSoC](https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/14-GSoC) on
[the Zulip development community server](../contributing/chat-zulip-org.md),
(compose a new stream message with your name as the topic).

Zulip operates under group mentorship.  That means you should
generally post in public streams on chat.zulip.org, not send private
messages, for assistance.  Our preferred approach is to just post in
an appropriate public stream on chat.zulip.org and someone will help
you.  We list the Zulip contributors who are experts for various
projects by name below; they will likely be able to provide you with
the best feedback on your proposal (feel free to @-mention them in
your Zulip post).

However, the first and most important thing to do for building a
strong application is to show your skills by contributing to a large
open source project like Zulip, to show that you can work effectively
in a large codebase (it doesn't matter what part of Zulip, and we're
happy to consider work in other open source projects).  The quality of
your best work is more important to us than the quantity; so be sure
to test your work before submitting it for review and follow our
coding guidelines (and don't worry if you make mistakes in your first
few contributions!  Everyone makes mistakes getting started.  Just
make sure you don't make the same mistakes next time).

Once you have several PRs merged (or at least one significant PR
merged), you can start discussing with the Zulip development community
the project you'd like to do, and developing a specific project plan.
We recommend discussing what you're thinking in public streams on
chat.zulip.org, so it's easy to get quick feedback from whoever is
online.

## Project ideas

These are the seeds of 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 for you 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.

We don't believe in labeling projects by difficulty (e.g. a project
that involves writing a lot of documentation will be hard for some
great programmers, and a UI design project might be hard for a great
backend programmer, while a great writer might have trouble doing
performance work).  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.

For all of our projects, an important skill to develop is a good
command of Git; read [our Git Guide](../git/overview.md) in full to
learn how to use it well.  Of particular importance is mastering using
Git rebase so that you can construct commits that are clearly correct
and explain why they are correct.

### Focus areas

For 2019, we are particularly interested in GSoC students who have
strong skills at visual design, HTML/CSS, mobile development,
performance optimization, or Electron.  So if you're a student 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 huge amount of essential work goes into other parts of
the project.  Every area of Zulip could benefit from the work of a
student with strong programming skills; so don't feel discouraged if
the areas mentioned above are not your main strength.

As a data point, in Summer 2017, we had 4 students working on the
React Native mobile app (1 focused primarily on visual design), 1 on
the Electron Desktop app, 2 on bots/integrations, 1 on webapp visual
design, 2 on our development tooling and automated testing
infrastructure, and the remaining 4 on various other parts of the
backend and core webapp.

### Full stack and web frontend focused projects

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

- Fill in gaps in Zulip's library of native integrations.  We have
  about 100 integrations, but there are a handful of important
  integrations that are missing.  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); once those are cleared, we'll likely have
  many more.  **Skills required**: Strong Python experience, will to
  do careful manual testing of third-party products.  Fluent English,
  usability sense and/or technical writing skills are all pluses.
  Expert: Eeshan Garg.

- Fill in the gaps in Zulip's
  [REST API documentation](https://zulipchat.com/api).  Zulip has a
  [nice framework](../documentation/api.md) for
  writing API documentation built by a student last summer based on
  the OpenAPI standard with built-in automated tests, but there are a
  few dozen endpoints that are missing, several of which are quite
  important.  See the [API docs area label][api-docs-area] for good
  starter projects and
  [this issue](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/10044) for a
  relevant TODO list.

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

- Make Zulip integrations easier for nontechnical users to setup.
  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.  **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://chat.zulip.org/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.

- Build a meta-integration that converts the Slack incoming webhook
  API to post messages into Zulip. Zulip has several dozen native
  integrations (https://chat.zulip.org/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.  Expert: Steve Howell.

- Visual design work on Zulip's logged-out pages, including /help,
  /apps, /integrations, /api, /login, /register, the zulip.org
  website, etc.  We'd love to make these look nicer both through
  polish and potentially through adding fun illustrations to make the product
  more friendly.  A project could include work on Zulip's logged-in UI
  as well.  **Skills required**: Design, HTML and CSS skills;
  JavaScript and illustration experience are helpful.  A great
  application would come with mockups for specific changes, and/or a
  set of PRs making small improvements to the logged-out UI.  Expert:
  Tim Abbott.

- Build support for outgoing webhooks and slash commands into Zulip to
  improve its chat-ops capabilities.  There's an existing
  [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. **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
  at `contrib_bots/` in the main Zulip repository that can be used for
  testing; the design document for the deployment part of this vision
  (likely part 1) is
  [here](../subsystems/custom-apps.md).
  **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.  Experts: Steve Howell.

- Improve the UI and visual design of the existing Zulip settings and
  administration pages.  Last summer, a student built a nice framework
  for many common elements (e.g. checkboxes, dropdowns, etc.) and
  migrated the codebase to use it, but the tables settings screens
  with tables are inconsistent, only one of them has a convenient
  sorting feature, etc.  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](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20admin).
  **Skills recommended**: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and an eye for visual
  design.  Expert: Shubham Dhama.

- Optimize web frontend performance and scalability.  Zulip is already
  one of the faster webapps 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.  **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).  Expert: Steve
  Howell.

- Build out the administration pages for Zulip to let admins set a
  retention policy for when old messages should be deleted, audit
  data, etc. ...  the sorts of things needed for Zulip to be used at
  larger organizations.  We get constant requests for these kinds
  of features from Zulip users.  The Zulip bug tracker has almost 50 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 5-10
  of the major missing features.  The first part of this project will
  be refactoring the admin UI interfaces to require writing less
  semi-duplicate code for each feature. **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: Shubham Dhama.

- Rebuild the Zulip web UI using a modern reactive layer like vue.js.
  Strategically, we'd start with self-contained, messy pieces (like the
presence layer), then move on to more complex pieces (like the
subscriptions page), and finally attach the main UI.  Definitely worth
reading the vue.js documentation and reading
[how Zulip's real-time sync works](../subsystems/events-system.md).
**Skills recommended**: Strong JavaScript experience, good
communication skills and an eye for detail.  We think this would be an
awesome project, but rewrite projects often introduce lots of bugs, so
we're interested in particularly careful candidates who have the
discipline to redo a small component at a time and carefully test for
regressions.  Good ways to demonstrate qualification for this are
finding and reporting bugs using
[Zulip's manual UI testing guide](../testing/manual-testing.md)
and doing
[refactoring projects](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/labels/area%3A%20refactoring).
Expert: Tommy Ip, Tim Abbott.

- Work on [Zulip Terminal](https://github.com/zulip/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
  webapp's quality level.  We would be happy to accept multiple strong
  students to work on this project.  **Skills required**: Python 3
  development skills, good communication and project management
  skills, good at reading code.  Experts: Aman Agrawal, Neil Pilgrim.

- Write cool new features for Zulip.  Play around with the software,
  browse Zulip's issues for things that seem important, and suggest
  something you’d like to build!  A great project can combine 3-5
  significant features.  Experts: Depends on the features!

- 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, a full 10% of Zulip's open issues are
  ideas for how to improve the project, 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.  A good place to start is
  [backend test coverage](https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/7089).

  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.

  **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: Tim Abbott (provision, testing), Steve Howell (tooling, testing).

- 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)).  **Skills
  required**: Experience with the target language and API design.
  Expert: Depends on language.

- Develop [**@zulipbot**](https://github.com/zulip/zulipbot), the GitHub
workflow bot for the Zulip organization and its repositories. By utilizing the
[GitHub API](https://developer.github.com/v3/),
[**@zulipbot**](https://github.com/zulipbot) improves the experience of Zulip
contributors by managing the issues and pull requests in the Zulip repositories,
such as assigning issues to contributors and appropriately labeling issues with
their current status to help contributors gain a better understanding of which
issues are being worked on. Since the project is in its early stages of
development, there are a variety of possible tasks that can be done, including
adding new features, writing unit tests and creating a testing framework, and
writing documentation. **Skills required**: Node.js, ECMAScript 6, and API
experience. Expert: Cynthia Lin, Joshua Pan.

### React Native mobile app

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

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 webapp (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.

**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: 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) making it easy to
  install the desktop app on a large number of machines for enterprise
  deployment.  Browse the open issues and get involved!

**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).

## Circulating proposals (February-March)

If you're applying to GSoC, we'd like for you to publicly post a few
sections of your proposal -- the project summary, list of
deliverables, and timeline -- some place public on the Web, sometime
in February or March. That way, the whole developer community -- not
just the mentors and administrators -- have a chance to give you
feedback and help you improve your proposal.

Where should you publish your draft?  We prefer Dropbox Paper or
Google Docs (or even just a message in Zulip), since those platforms
allow people to look at the text without having to log in or download
a particular app, and you can update the draft as you improve your
idea.  In either case, you should post the draft for feedback in
chat.zulip.org.

Rough is fine! The ideal first draft to get feedback from the
community on should include primarily (1) links to your contributions
to Zulip (or other projects) and (2) a paragraph or two explaining
what you plan to work on.  Your friends are likely better able to help
you improve the sections of your application explaining who you are,
and this helps the community focus feedback on the areas you can most
improve (e.g. either doing more contributions or adjusting the project
plan).


We hope to hear from you! And thanks for being interested in
Zulip. We're always happy to help volunteers get started contributing
to our open source project, whether or not they go through GSoC.