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 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

We have designed all our projects to have incremental milestones that can be completed throughout the program. Consequently, Zulip projects described below are generally compatible with both large-sized (350 hours) and medium-sized (175 hours) projects. 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. Because it takes significant time investment to learn how to contribute complex features to Zulip's codebase, we are not planning to offer small-size projects.

Contributors who master the art of consistently packaging their work into correct, reviewable pull requests are able to make major improvements to the Zulip app. If you pay attention to the contributor guidelines, carefully review your own work before asking anyone else for review, take the time to clearly communicate your changes, and apply the feedback you receive to your next contribution, you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish.

Focus areas

For 2024, we are particularly interested in GSoC contributors who have strong skills at full-stack feature development, Typescript, visual design, HTML/CSS, Flutter, or performance optimization. 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, read documentation, 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 on GitHub; each has a cluster of problems in one part of the Zulip project that we'd love to improve.

Full stack and web frontend focused projects

Code: github.com/zulip/zulip -- Python, Django, TypeScript/JavaScript, and CSS.

• Cluster of priority features. Implement a cluster of new full stack features for Zulip. The high priority label 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); the goal will be to implement and get fully merged a cluster of features with a meaningful impact on the project. Zulip has a lot of half-finished PRs, so some features might be completed by reading, understanding, rebasing, and reviving an existing pull request. 175 or 350 hours; difficulty will vary. Skills required: Depends on the features; Tim Abbott will help you select an appropriate cluster once we've gotten to know you and your strengths through your getting involved in the project.

  Experts: Tim Abbott and various others depending on project area

• Complete some unfinished projects. This is a variant of the previous project idea category, but focused on projects with significant existing work to start from and polish, rather than projects that have not been seriously attempted previously.

  Recent sweeps through the Zulip server and web app tracker have identified about 100 open pull requests where a previous contributor (sometimes via GSoC!) did significant work towards something valuable, and there's significant feedback from maintainers, but the project was never finished, and requires significant further effort from a new contributor in order to progress. These are tracked via the completion candidate label. One of our goals for this summer's GSoC is to complete many of these issues. Start by picking something that's interesting to you, and you feel you have the skills required to complete. Read the code and the feedback, and then create your own PR for the issue. Remember to carefully test your work (there may be problems that the reviewers missed, or that were introduced by rebasing across other changes!), and credit the original contributor as documented in our commit guidelines. We expect to have a more detailed guide on this process available this Spring. Skills required: Varies with project; a common skill will be good reading comprehension and organization/communication skills, to walk maintainers through how you resolved problems, addressed any pending feedback on the previous PR, and your understanding of the outstanding questions for a given project. Taking the time to get really good at resolving merge conflicts is likely to be valuable here as well.

  Experts: Tim Abbott and various others depending on project area

• Help migrate our JavaScript codebase to Typescript. Zulip is in the process of porting the main web app JavaScript codebase to TypeScript; at present, about 40% of the project is written in TypeScript. We've resolved most of the roadblocks to completing this migration, so it's mostly a matter of carefully translating modules, putting in the effort with preparatory commits to make it any refactoring easy to verify. Our goal is to leave the resulting code more readable than it was before, always test the module works after the migration, and avoid introducing logic bugs during this large refactor. This topic in the Zulip development community is a good place to coordinate work on this project. Multiple students are possible; 175 or 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 (Often using Zod to parse and verify data received from the server) and checking their work carefully.

  Experts: Zixuan James Li, Evy Kassirer, Anders Kaseorg

• Contribute to Zulip's migration to user groups for permissions. This migration is intended to replace every setting in Zulip that currently allows organizations to assign permissions based on role (admin, moderator, etc.) with a setting based on arbitrary "user groups", making it much more customizable. This is very important for large organizations using Zulip, including businesses and open-source projects. Much of the basic design, API structure, and scaffolding is complete, but there is a lot of work that remains to complete this vision. The project can likely support a couple students; there is considerable work to be done on the settings UI, both for user groups and for channel and organization-level settings, dozens of existing settings to migrate, and many new settings that users have long requested that we've delayed adding in order to avoid having to migrate them. 175 or 350 hours; moderate difficulty. Skills required: Python, JavaScript, and CSS. Attention to detail around code reuse/duplication, thoughtful testing, and splitting large migrations into reviewable chunks.

  Experts: Sahil Batra

• Improve the framework and UI in Zulip's overlays for managing channels and groups. These two components have very parallel design patterns and implementations (the groups one is quite new!). Coupled with the user groups permissions migration, the goal of this project is to make these important settings panels ergonomic for the large number of new settings that we expect to migrate or add via the groups migration. See the user groups settings and channel settings area labels for starter projects.

  Experts: Purushottam Tiwari, Sahil Batra

• Migrate Zulip's direct message recipient data structures to a new model that enables personal settings associated with a direct message conversation, and add several settings (see the linked issues) enabled by that infrastructure work. Skills required: This project will be deep Python 3/PostgreSQL work. Concretely, challenging parts of this project include thinking about races and database transactions, writing database migrations intended to be run live at scale, complex internal refactors, and carefully verifying the indexes used by migrated database queries.

  Experts: Tim Abbott, Mateusz Mandera, Prakhar Pratyush

• Add the core infrastructure for topic-based permissions and settings like pinned topics and read-only topics, and then build some of those settings. This project will be a mixture of Python 3/PostgreSQL work, including thinking about database transactions and races, writing database migrations intended to be run live at scale, and complex logic to handle moving messages correctly in the context of these settings, including significant changes to the Zulip API and API documentation.

  Skills required: A high level of fluency with writing readable Python 3 and thinking about corner cases.

  Experts: Tim Abbott, Prakhar Pratyush

• Zulip's REST API documentation, which is an important resource for any organization integrating with Zulip, as well as the developers of our API clients. Zulip has a nice framework 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 templates could be deleted with a bit of framework effort, etc. See the API docs area label for some specific projects in the area; and git grep pending_endpoints to find the list of endpoints that need documentation and their priorities. 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. Skills 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

• Improve the UI and visual design of the Zulip web app. We are working on a major redesign for the core surfaces of the Zulip web app -- see the redesign label for specced out work, with more to come. We're particularly excited about students who are interested in making our CSS clean and readable as part of working on the UI. 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, Karl Stolley, Alya Abbott

• Optimize performance and scalability, either for the web frontend or the server. Zulip is already one of the faster web apps out there, but we have a number of ideas for how to make it substantially faster yet. 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 Performance profiling tools (but you can pick this up as you go) can be useful depending on what profiling shows. Our backend scalability design doc and the performance label may be helpful reading for the backend part of this.

  Experts: Tim Abbott

• Fill in gaps, fix bugs, and improve the framework for Zulip's library of native integrations. We have about 120 native integrations, but there are a number of others we would like to add. Also, several extensions to the framework that would dramatically improve the user experience of using integrations, e.g., being able to do callbacks to third-party services like Stripe to display more user-friendly notifications. The the integrations label on GitHub 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.

  Experts: Zixuan James Li, Lauryn Menard

• 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 would be great to demonstrate as part of an application. The Zulip integration writing guide and integration documentation are useful materials for learning about how things currently work, and the integrations label on GitHub has a bunch of good starter issues to demonstrate your skills if you're interested in this area.

  Experts: Zixuan James Li, Lauryn Menard

• 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 these four labels 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). 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.

  Expert: Tim Abbott

Terminal app

Code: Zulip Terminal

Experts: Neil Pilgrim, Aman Agrawal

• Work on Zulip Terminal, the official terminal client for Zulip. zulip-terminal is out in beta, but there's still a lot to do for it to approach parity with the web app. We would be happy to accept multiple strong students to work on this project. 175 or 350 hours; medium difficulty. Skills required: Python 3 development skills, good communication and project management skills, good at reading code and testing.

Desktop app

Code: Our cross-platform desktop app written in JavaScript on Electron.

Expert: Anders Kaseorg

• Contribute to our Electron-based desktop client application. 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) polishing 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 without good automated testing, so the bar for writing high quality, reviewable PRs that convince others your work is correct is high. Skills required: JavaScript, Electron; you can learn Electron as part of your application.

• 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. Skills required: Ability to learn quickly. Experience with Rust and secure software design may be helpful.

Mobile app

Code: The next-generation Zulip mobile app, written with Flutter (now in beta)

Experts: Greg Price, Chris Bobbe

• Work on the upcoming Flutter-based Zulip client. We're in the midst of rewriting Zulip's mobile app from scratch using Flutter, to replace the legacy React Native-based app. The Flutter app reached beta in December 2023, we're working now toward a wider beta, and during the GSoC 2024 period we expect to be working toward turning the beta into a version we can roll out for all Zulip's mobile users.

  This project will involve building features for the Flutter app, including code for UI, data structures, and interacting with the Zulip server and the Android and/or iOS platforms. For a sense of the features we're working on, see our project board for the new app; the "Launch" milestone corresponds roughly to what we expect to be working on during GSoC. For some features, we may find ourselves contributing changes upstream to the Flutter project itself. 175 or 350 hours; difficult.

  Skills required: Ability to learn quickly, check your work carefully, and communicate clearly and accurately. The code for this project will be written primarily in Dart atop Flutter; previous experience may be helpful, but you can learn both during the contributions leading up to your application. Previous experience with Android or iOS may also be helpful but is not necessary.