The GSoC Arc: How I Almost Didn't Show Up to My Own Story
"This wasn't a success story. It started as survival." Intro Hey, I'm Supreeth C , a third-year engineering student, open source developer, and professional overthinker from Bengaluru. This is my first blog, and fair warning: it's long. Not "LinkedIn post with 5 bullet points" long. Actually long. This is the story of how I got selected for Google Summer of Code 2026 with CircuitVerse but more honestly, it's the story of how I almost didn't submit a proposal, almost quit twice, and spent a lot amount of time reading codebases on the Bengaluru Metro while missing my stop. Connect with me on GitHub and LinkedIn PS: I'm writing this at 4.05am, because sleep is a myth XD. Act I: The Prequel Second semester. Fresh-faced. Absolutely clueless. I joined Pointblank , the one genuinely breathable space in my Tier-3 college. I can say its the best student-run club overall and the main reason being : everyone around me was terrifyingly good . Codeforces experts and specialists, GSoC mentees, LFX mentees, Smart India Hackathon winners. People whose LinkedIn bios are of several lines. And me? I knew C++. That was it. That was my entire personality. Cue the imposter syndrome : that lovely feeling where you're convinced you snuck into a room you have no business being in, and everyone else is one conversation away from figuring it out. My solution? Chaos. I started learning everything simultaneously: web dev, Android, ML, DevOps, a bit of systems engineering. Jack of all trades, master of none, spiraling fast. I wasn't learning; I was collecting domains like Pokémon and actually using none of them. Then a senior said something that cut clean through the noise: "Find your own path." So I slowed down. Started from the basics of web dev. Attended many hackathons but always ended up in third or fourth and winning: zero . But something clicked anyway. Those hackathons introduced me to open source, and somewhere in that chaos, I gave myself a simple challenge: 4 pull requests for Hacktob