It's 6am here and I couldn't be happier seeing my name on the list of selected proposals!!!

I was rejected by GSoC two years ago with 3 proposals submitted, it was (maybe) the second last chance for me to participate in GSoC because of my schools's weird semester scheduling. This year my proposal was accepted by Chapel, probably because of my background in parallel computing and linear algebra. And two years ago I made a proposal of a GPU project to Blender thinking that I would get selected, but before the proposal submission deadline I knew from my feedback on IRC that it most likely wouldn't be the case. Before that in GCI I spent a couple months grinding on tasks every day, it was the first and sometimes the only thing I would do once I get home from school. There was a list of tasks completed by each student throughout the competition. I tried my best to make sure I was one of the top two students for both quantity and quality of tasks done, actively asking for mentors' feedback. But at the end, I was very disappointed, and a bit frustrated, to find that I wasn't selected as a winner for the organization. Until now, I'm still not too sure why I wasn't selected, maybe I actually "deserved" it, maybe I didn't at all. I really think it would've make some significant difference in my university and most importantly internship applications if I won, so it is still a bit of regret that I couldn't make it, but I guess I would never know. I really wish there is an ideal version of GSoC that whoever puts in a decent amount of efforts given their background would be selected.

I'm very glad I found Chapel. I started preparing for GSoC since last year, and I was preparing for another organization that does scientific computing. The project is quite similar - parallel computing and linear algebra. (They selected the other one of the two students who shown interest in the project, or maybe I was selected in both but I wouldn't know.) I was searching for organizations with keywords such as "parallel" and "GPU" but I didn't find Chapel the first time. I only discovered Chapel around late March and I was very surprised. To be honest if I found Chapel in other channels like normal Internet surfing or Reddit, I would be just as delighted. I was doing parallel computing research in school, and seeing an open source project that makes it much more accessible to programmers and researchers, was a wonderful news. Thank you to everyone who made this project possible and made it what it is today.

Anyway I'm very excited to see what we're able to achieve in the next few months. Two years ago when I first started doing GPU research, I thought that it would really be ground-breaking for me if I managed to beat NVIDIA, to make faster GPU programs than them. Last year I really did! In open source we gather a lot of great minds to cover a lot of perspectives that are needed to develop great software. I would be very glad to see Chapel being better and better.

Thank you all and I wish all of you the very best with your talents and hard work.