"This wasn't a success story. It started as survival."
Intro
Hey, I'm Supreeth C, a third-year engineering student, open source developer, and professional overthinker from Bengaluru. This is my first blog, and fair warning: it's long. Not "LinkedIn post with 5 bullet points" long. Actually long.
This is the story of how I got selected for Google Summer of Code 2026 with CircuitVerse but more honestly, it's the story of how I almost didn't submit a proposal, almost quit twice, and spent a lot amount of time reading codebases on the Bengaluru Metro while missing my stop.
Connect with me on GitHub and LinkedIn
PS: I'm writing this at 4.05am, because sleep is a myth XD.
Act I: The Prequel
Second semester. Fresh-faced. Absolutely clueless.
I joined Pointblank, the one genuinely breathable space in my Tier-3 college. I can say its the best student-run club overall and the main reason being : everyone around me was terrifyingly good. Codeforces experts and specialists, GSoC mentees, LFX mentees, Smart India Hackathon winners. People whose LinkedIn bios are of several lines.
And me? I knew C++. That was it. That was my entire personality.
Cue the imposter syndrome: that lovely feeling where you're convinced you snuck into a room you have no business being in, and everyone else is one conversation away from figuring it out.
My solution? Chaos. I started learning everything simultaneously: web dev, Android, ML, DevOps, a bit of systems engineering. Jack of all trades, master of none, spiraling fast. I wasn't learning; I was collecting domains like Pokémon and actually using none of them.
Then a senior said something that cut clean through the noise: "Find your own path."
So I slowed down. Started from the basics of web dev. Attended many hackathons but always ended up in third or fourth and winning: zero. But something clicked anyway. Those hackathons introduced me to open source, and somewhere in that chaos, I gave myself a simple challenge: 4 pull requests for Hacktoberfest '24.
Act II: The Setback: 4 PRs and a Crisis of Confidence
I hit the 4 PRs. Technically.
One was a navbar color change. Another was a dark mode toggle. The kind of contributions that, in hindsight, make you cringe just slightly into your pillow at night.
Still, it was a start.
I went looking for GSoC orgs because, frankly, they sounded prestigious and mysterious. I picked three orgs from the 200+ list and contributed for two weeks each.
Nothing. No reviews. No responses. No connection. Just me, shouting into the void of GitHub issues and hearing nothing back.
I quit. Moved on. Decided GSoC probably wasn't for me.
Then, at 3am (because all the best and worst decisions happen at 3am), I was doomscrolling YouTube and stumbled across someone building circuit designs on CircuitVerse. That name felt familiar. I pulled up their GitHub. I found their community channel. I attended a weekly meet.
And for the first time, I felt like I belonged somewhere.
I started picking up real issues. Raised PRs that actually got reviewed. This was February-March, prime GSoC proposal season, and contributors with 10, 15, 20+ PRs were already well established. I felt behind. I was behind.
When the project list dropped, I read it, panicked, convinced myself my contributions weren't enough, my proposal wouldn't hold up, and...
I didn't submit.
Deadline passed. Ship sank. Self-inflicted.
I watched my peers get selected. Watched it change their trajectories. And I sat there thinking about every moment I could have just clicked submit and didn't.
That one hurt. And it was supposed to.
Act III: The IndiaFOSS Plot Twist
Here's where the story gets unexpectedly wholesome.
The CircuitVerse team was going to be at IndiaFOSS '25. I saw Aboobacker's message on Slack. The tickets were sold out. And luckily my club was taking care of the volunteering and I managed to snag a volunteering spot.
Worth it.
I met Vedant bhaiya and Aman bhaiya in person. The same people I'd only known through community calls and slight LinkedIn stalking. I walked up, told them I'd been contributing, and had a real conversation.
It sounds small. It wasn't. There's something about meeting the humans behind the codebase that makes the work feel real. That day, I stopped thinking about GSoC as a competition and started thinking about it as a community I genuinely wanted to be part of.
Target locked: GSoC '26, CircuitVerse.
Act IV: The Return - No More Excuses
Post-IndiaFOSS, I stopped drifting.
With this hustle mindset, I won Smart India Hackathon and landed my first good internship. Two things I'd stopped expecting to happen. Both arrived at once.
I could have coasted. I didn't.
Hacktoberfest '25 came around, and this time I didn't care about the PR count. I just started contributing to CircuitVerse again only because I wanted to, and the codebase felt familiar, because I genuinely cared about the bugs I was fixing more than I cared about my 4 pending Jira tickets at my intership.
At some point, I stopped counting my PRs. That's when I knew something had shifted.
I was reading through the CircuitVerse codebase on the Metro while switching lines, missing stops, earphones in, completely oblivious to Bengaluru traffic chaos outside.
That's the version of work that doesn't feel like work.
Act V: The Proposal - Where the Real Work Began
With a solid contribution history behind me, I finally sat down to write the proposal.
How hard could it be, I thought, like a fool.
The projects looked approachable at first glance. Then I started building the Proof of Concept and reality reintroduced itself, firmly.
I wrote draft after draft. Read them forwards, backwards, sideways. Rewrote sections that sounded good the night before and embarrassingly vague the next morning. Worked out timelines. Justified design decisions. Tried to communicate months of thinking in a document that had to be both technical and compelling.
Two proposals. Submitted three days before the deadline.
Then came the waiting. Two weeks of silence. My friend told me this everytime i mentioned about the interview call: "If u r supposed to get it, nothing can stop it. You are putting in efforts it will definitely return."
Meanwhile, other contributors were already getting interview calls.
Mid-April, my call came.
I explained my approach, walked through my timeline, answered most of the questions as clearly as I could. Once done, I just waited for the result. Gave my best shot at this. If I didn't make it this time, I'd simply try again.
Act VI: The Result
April 30th. Result day.
I was in the middle of lab exams on the 29th when my friends texted that the results leaked through the response JSON on the portal.
I saw CircuitVerse under my name, and I felt the tiny stuck up relief. Nevertheless I waited for the official confirmation anyway.
Midnight. The email arrived.
Selected. CircuitVerse. Project 4.
I woke up my family. My parents and sister were thrilled in the way only people who've watched you struggle quietly for a long time can be. I felt the kind of satisfaction that doesn't need to announce itself, it just quietly settles in and stays.
Epilogue
"The story didn't change in a single dramatic moment. It changed quietly and in the decision to keep going when nobody was watching :))."
All I would say is do it for the love of the work. Nothing best comes out ever from forcing yourself or living for someone else's dream. In the end it's just you and your stories to tell to people. There's a whole lot of empty canvas which is waiting to be colored upon.
Community Bonding Period: First Look Inside
The first phase of GSoC is community bonding where the mentors, admins, and mentees are on a call, aligning on deliverables and getting to know each other.
My first meet post-selection, I saw Aboobacker on the call. Around me were engineers from GitLab, Juspay, people who've built things I've used. And there I was, just starting out, somehow in the same room.
It felt earned. That's a new feeling.
What's left now is the simplest and hardest thing: build the project, hit the deliverables, enjoy the summer.
