Follow-Up on GSoC 2025 TabStrip Proposal – Feedback & Clarification

[Koushik]

Hi Team,

My name is Koushik. I hope you are all doing well.

I applied to GSoC 2025 with the WebUI TabStrip proposal. Although I was not selected, I greatly appreciated the chance to contribute to Chromium and engage with the community.

I would like to point out an observation: I ranked the “Debug WebUI for TabStrip States” proposal as my first choice and began contributing on March 17, 2025 [Contribution Link].  Throughout, I maintained consistent communication with mentors, fulfilled every requested task, and invested considerable time and effort and wrote a detailed proposal. 

By contrast Brijesh Giri, who was accepted for that project, only started contributing on April 6, 2025[Contribution Link] , just 2 days before the GSOC contributor application deadline.
I understand that GSoC is highly competitive, which I am totally aware of, which is precisely why I started showing effort and communication clearly regarding the project, a long month before application deadline. 
Whereas on the other hand , Brijesh Giri by contrast started contribution and communicating on April 6th, 2025. 

I respect and have no regrets about the outcome. I also submitted a second proposal, Improve Chromium Web Audio Testing (rejected), but I saw and knew that the selected contributors worked hard and had several contributions merged.

I would be grateful for concrete feedback on my TabStrip proposal:

• Which areas lacked sufficient depth or clarity?

• What specific improvements could have strengthened my submission?

• On what grounds was my application ultimately declined?

 Your insights will help me grow and prepare for future open-source programs.

Thank you both for your guidance during the application process. I remain eager to contribute to Chromium and stay involved, GSoC or not.

Warm regards,
Koushik Kumar Bug
+91-7047274427
[Linked In]
[Proposal Link]

[Darryl James]

Hi Koushik!

Thank you for considering our project and putting in the effort that you did! We were really impressed with your proposal and the solution to the bug you had attempted.

One of the disappointing things this year, for me at least, was how close in terms of quality the top contributors' proposals were for this project. This made our final decision extremely difficult. To be specific, Shibalik and I spent more time on the top 2 proposals than any of the other proposals combined. Yours and Brijesh. 

Both of the proposals were similar in terms of detail, quality, design, thoughtfulness, exploration, clarity. At the same time, they were different. One was more technical and answered the question to "How do you solve this problem?". One was at a higher level and answered the question to "How could you solve this problem?".

One set of feedback I will give you for this specific project is to lean a little more into the TabCollections architecture. To think about what this architecture allows us to do with our data that might simplify the design and at the same time allow us to create a more modular system that can handle new types of collections in the future. To extend this to the general sense, once we have solved a problem, are we able to simplify it?

During our feedback rounds / back and forth I should have commented more on this line of thinking but didn't. This is on me. I was not expecting any contributors to propose a solution in this way. However, this alone was not enough to be the deciding factor in our contributor selection. So I encouraged some of our top contributors / proposals at the time to attempt a starter bug for our project (this was roughly 1 week before the deadline). In the end there were 2 solutions Shibalik and I really liked. Both solutions are similar, but different.

In terms of the application deadline, everyone has different time commitments. As long as contributors submit their proposals / bugs / any other piece of data that they would like us to review, and as long as it follows the GSoC guidelines, that is okay. In particular, many contributors that had submitted proposals also started early but may not have commented publicly on any bugs / submitted patches to gerrit.

That said, you did an excellent job on your proposal! This year was just ultra competitive. Keep up the good work and continue to do amazing things!

Thank you for your time!

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[Koushik]

Thank you Darryl for your detailed and thoughtful feedback regarding my GSoC 2025 proposal. I genuinely appreciate the time and effort you and Shibalik invested in reviewing my submission and for acknowledging the quality and effort I put into it.

I understand that the selection process was highly competitive, and I respect the decision made. Your insights about the importance of aligning proposals with the TabCollections architecture and focusing on modularity and extensibility are invaluable. I recognize that integrating these aspects more deeply could have strengthened my proposal.

While I am proud of the work I submitted, I am keen to learn and grow from this experience.
I remain enthusiastic about contributing to Chromium and am eager to apply the lessons learned to future projects. Thank you once again for your support and mentorship throughout this process.

Warm regards,

Koushik