From a Student Who Used CircuitVerse to a GSoC Contributor — My Community Bonding Story

Harkeerat Singh — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:09:06 +0000

📍 Where It All Started

In January 2026, I was browsing through GSoC organisations, shortlisting ones that matched my interests in computer science. Then I came across CircuitVerse — and it wasn't a new name to me at all.

A year before, I was struggling with my Digital and Logic Design course. Sequential circuits felt abstract until I started building them on CircuitVerse. Being able to see a D flip-flop hold state, or watch a 3-bit counter tick through its sequence in real time, made concepts click in a way no textbook had managed. CircuitVerse genuinely helped me get there.

So seeing it listed as a GSoC organisation felt personal. This was a chance to give something back to the platform that had helped me. I decided to start contributing.

💻 February — Getting Into the Codebase

I started with beginner-friendly issues in February, exploring both the Vue frontend and the main Rails repository. My first contributions were small but impactful:

🔤 Fixing typos
⌨️ Improving keyboard accessibility for the header dropdowns
🔍 Making the search icon focusable

Nothing glamorous, but it taught me how the codebase was structured and how the contribution process worked.

📝 The Proposal — Late Nights and Midterms

Of all the projects listed on the idea list, one stood out: Structured Format for Saved Circuit Data.

The problem was "elegant" and "genuinely hard". Currently, two logically identical circuits saved in different orders produce completely different files. The goal was to build a canonical, deterministic format that produces identical output for any two logically equivalent circuits.

I decided to build a Proof of Concept before writing a single word of the proposal and recorded a demo showing matching hashes on import and export.

And then I wrote the proposal. I will be honest, that was the least interesting part of all. But somehow I was doing all of this while preparing for my midterms.

FINALLY, on March 30th 07:49 PM , I submitted the proposal! Late — but worth it!

⏳ April — The Wait and the Interview

After submitting, I checked Slack every single day. Every morning, first thing. Waiting to see if a mentor had messaged me for an interview. A few days of silence, and I started second-guessing everything. These were really stressful weeks.

Then on April 14th, the message came. I said yes without a second thought. I prepared for the interview. The mentors asked sharp, thoughtful questions — some I answered well, some made me realise there were corners of the project I needed to think through more carefully. It was a good kind of difficult.

🎉 April 30th, 2026 | 11:33 PM

I opened the GSoC dashboard. My project was live.

I sat there for a moment just staring at the screen. A year of using the platform, two months of contributing, late nights on the proposal, the interview — it had all landed.

The next morning, I woke up and genuinely thought I had dreamed it. I checked the dashboard again just to be sure.

It was real.

🤝 The Community Bonding Period

May 2nd — Organization Meeting

The community bonding period kicked off with an organisation-wide meeting. We met mentors, fellow GSoC contributors, and the people behind other projects. It was relaxed, warm, and genuinely fun — less like a formal meeting and more like a friendly group hangout.

May 9th — Project Kickoff

My project-specific meeting was with my mentors Aboobacker, JoshVarga, Arnabdaz, Aryann. We went through the timeline, discussed the algorithm design in depth, and aligned on how the canonical format should handle edge.

The meeting was fun, and I learned many new things and got very useful insights.

🔮 What's Next

The coding period begins May 25th.

The community bonding period has been everything I hoped — technically productive, genuinely warm, and motivating.

I'm grateful to my mentors for the opportunity and for the quality of feedback they've already given.

Let's see what the coding period brings. Very excited! 🔥

DEV Community: Harkeerat Singh