Standing in the position of being in final evaluation is surreal.
The journey for GSoC started in January 2018, when I came to know about it but did not know where to start. I spent roughly 3 weeks trying to figure out how to select organizations, being in different mailing lists and slack groups, trying my best to comprehend how can I keep up with the students who are well ahead of me in understanding Open Source Community and projects.
In February 2018, I selected a project in Python and tried to blend in the community. This went on for a month, but I could not develop passion for the project and could not do any tangible work. I started to feel that GSoC was not for me, as I was not getting enough guidance which I needed to taste the waters. I was on the brink of giving up, but in the end of first week of March 2018, I found NumFOCUS and its projects in R and Python, which are my favorites. The amazing community gave me motivation to go on and give a successful try to GSoC selection.
The points mentioned in the ideas list for rdataretriever, have been covered. The Reticulate based functions are working on different operating systems, the documentation for the new functions have been updated, the PATH problems for Python and retriever have been resolved. I was stuck with personal problems in the last few weeks of GSoC and therefore due to the incomplete final stages of testing the merging has not yet been done.
Google Summer of Code has been one of a kind experience for me. The excitement of trying out new things, pursuit of new solutions and the never ending enthusiasm from the mentors are unparalleled. After the GSoC ends officially, I will continue working on the testing part of the new codes for successful integration of the work done during GSoC to reflect in the official rdataretriever package.