A glimpse into the future (my future, of course)

Hello again,

Before I get started I just want to let you know that in this post I will talk about the future of my career and moving beyond the GSoC so this will only be indirectly related to the summer of code.

As you may or may not know, I will start my MSc in Applied Computing at the University of Toronto in September (2015, in case you're reading this in the future). Well, I have decided steer towards topics like Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing.

While I still don't know what I will end up having has my main area of focus nor where this new journey will take me, I am pretty sure it will have to do with Data Science and Python. I am also sure that I will keep contributing to SciPy and most likely start contributing to other related communities like NumPy, pandas and scikit-learn so you could say that the GSoC has had a positive impact by helping me find areas that make my motivation soar and introducing me to people who have been working in this realm for a very long time and know a ton of stuff that make me want to pick up a book and learn.

In my latest meeting with Ralf (my mentor), we had a discussion regarding the growing scope of the GSoC project and my concern about dealing with all the unforeseen and ambiguous details that arise along the way. He seemed oddly pleased as I proposed to keep in touch with the project even after the "pencils down" date for the GSoC. He then explained that this is the purpose of the summer of code (to bring together students and organisations) and their hope when they choose a student to participate is that he/she will become a longterm active member of the community which is precisely what I would like to do.

I have many thanks to give and there is still a lot of work to be done with the project so I will save the thank you speech for later. For now I just want to say that this has been a great experience and I have already gotten more out of it than I had hoped (which was a lot).

Until my next post,
Abraham.