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FAQs
This page covers GSoC 2025 FAQs! With many thanks to the prospective GSoC applicants who asked excellent questions and therefore helped to make this resource possible.
Right now is the time to explore and to develop proposals. After proposals are submitted, some will be accepted, and then work can begin. So for now, please feel free to try things out and explore (and keep asking questions!), but please do not work on the projects directly.
We suggest getting familiar with the part of the code and ecosystem more relevant to the project you’d be interested in. Each project lists which codebase it is related to. If you find a good first issue that is relevant to your interests, go ahead and comment your interest!
First, please be sure to review the official GSoC guidance on writing a proposal, as well as all the resources we've put together in this wiki.
- Feb 26 - March 24: You’re welcome to ask questions on the Discourse thread
- March 24 - April 8: Register on the site and submit proposals for projects. After this, proposals will be reviewed by mentors.
- May 8: Selected projects and participants are announced, and mentorship begins!
The proposal itself is very important. We are looking for your creativity and detail in proposing technical work and planning it our before actually doing it. As the “proposal” section in this example GSoC Template suggests: “Explain what algorithms/technologies you intend to use/study (if any). You can also include links to additional details like diagrams, etc., outlining your ideas acting as supplementary information for your proposal outside of this scope.” and “How do you plan to spend your summer? … The project plan and its timeline will form a significant part of the assessment of your application, as well as mid-term and final evaluations.”
If you’d like to dig further into the open issues on GitHub, here are some help wanted and good first issues in each of the project repositories:
If you are finding it difficult to find good first issues relevant to your project proposal, keep in mind that contributions may be either on GitHub or outside! both Processing4 and p5.js adopt the all-contributors specification, which means that a contributor is someone who works in any of these areas: Emoji Key ✨ (and Contribution Types) So if you cannot find an issue that is available and helps you write a proposal, you can also think about another form of contribution, like a blog post, tutorial, series of examples, bug reports of accessibility issues, etc!
Please be sure to check out the Contributor Guidelines first, especially:
You should not file a pull request (or start working on code changes) without a corresponding issue or before an issue has been approved for implementation; that is because the proposed fix may not be accepted, need a different approach entirely, or the actual problem is somewhere else. Any pull requests filed before the issue has been approved for fixing will be closed until approval is given to the issue.
This is really important, and I know if can be frustrating to wait for responses, but that is why it may be helpful to keep in mind that, under the all-contributors specification, there are many ways to contribute outside of GitHub, too!
All these comments are based on questions that came up in the Discourse thread. Keep in mind some of the tips might be applicable even beyond the specific project!
If you want to work on this project, one way to go about it is to investigate what existing methods and tools exist (many of them out there!) and then figure out which (and how!) can be meaningfully combined into an embedder tool. This investigation can look like trying out existing tools, maybe even creating open-source examples/tutorials about them (this would certainly count as a contribution!), but not quite yet developing the project itself.
In the case of the friendly sketch embedder project, using the p5.js Editor to make some sketches and then trying to embed them using existing tools/methods would be a good way to get familiar with various tools. Use the p5.js reference to explore different functionalities, and also use Examples and Tutorials on the websites to make more complex sketches to see how they work, and if some are more difficult to embed than others.
When we were discussing this project, we envisioned some balance of using some of the many tools/methods out there, and building something stand-alone so that it could be really user-friendly and straightforward.