Details for my contribution to GSOC, community bonding period and timeline - Implementing the Simformer for sbi GSOC 2025

[Massimiliano Carli]

Dear NumFocus HR,

I am Massimiliano Carli, a student who will participate in GSoC 2025 (the email I am using now is the same I used for the GSoC account), under the sub-organization "sbi" in the project "Implementing the Simformer for sbi".

Firstly, thank you for considering my application for the GSoC! I'm really excited to participate in this experience and ready to dedicate myself to the project.

I already wrote to my mentors, reporting the same information I am writing to you too here.

What I am planning to do in this period is:

• Setting up my development environment for coding on sbi
• Experiment further with sbi, following some of the tutorials on the docs, experimenting with the JAX implementation of the Simformer
• Participating in the sbi discord channel, taking a look at issues and PRs on the sbi codebase, replicating/reporting bugs if I find any
• Eventually try to provide some patches and small fixes if I find any on sbi
• Delve deeper on SDE-based diffusion models, reading the TransferLab pills and study more concepts related
  

Other than that, GSoC advised us Contributors to communicate breaks we may take during summer; in my case, I may need the following three breaks during my project, which I can cover by working extra hours in the following/preceding days:

• From 7th to 10th June (4 days) I will participate as a volunteer electoral pool scrutineer in my hometown for the incoming Italian referendum (https://www.interno.gov.it/it/notizie/referendum-abrogativi-2025-cinque-i-quesiti-lavoro-e-cittadinanza --- the link is in Italian, but I think you can translate it using Google Translator just if you wanted to have a look), thus I won't be able to work on the project in those specific dates; I aim to cover up this difference by working extra hours in the following/preceding days (luckily the 7th and 8th will be weekend days anyway).

• On the 24th of July (1 day) I have the bachelor graduation ceremony of my little brother, so I won't be able to work that day; I aim to cover the missing hours by working more on the following/preceding days too.

• From 31st of July to 10th of August (11 days) I will need to reduce the number of hours per day as I will have to go to London for my girlfriend's graduation ceremony. Also here, I aim to cover missing hours as much as possible working in the preceding/following days; fortunately, this will happen once both deliverables 1 and 2 (i.e., the actual implementation of the Simformer in sbi) should be already finished; this period coincides with the planned time to start writing documentation, benchmarks, and tutorials for users; if it will be necessary, I will make use of some of the "buffer time" I reserved at the end of the proposed timeline in my application.

At the moment, I don't see any necessity to change the number of total planned weeks for the project, so I would stick with the standard GSoC times declared in my application.

Other than that, in order to follow the rules you listed on GitHub (https://github.com/numfocus/gsoc/blob/master/README.md#during-the-summer), I will aim to make a blog post for you every other week, and send emails regularly (I suppose to the same address I am writing to now).

I kindly ask you to respond to this email to make sure I wrote to the right email address, or with any other information you may need.

Best regards,

Massimiliano Carli

[Massimiliano Carli]

Dear NumFocus Offices,

I just wanted to make you up to date with my current state of the community bond period with sbi for Google Summer of Code 2025. 

As you advised in your GitHub guide for GSOC I prepared a blog post, you can find it here:

https://medium.com/@nmaax/kicking-off-gsoc-my-community-bonding-period-experience-34d5af08fed1

As a general rule, I will try to make a blog post every other week, still on Medium; while also emailing you to notify that a new blog post has been published.

Best regards,

Massimiliano Carli