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GSoC 2025 - Divyanshu Gautam

About me​

Hi, I’m Divyanshu Gautam, a software developer, and a final-year B.Tech Computer Science student. I’m passionate about building scalable, impactful software solutions and exploring the latest technologies in backend and frontend development.

I began contributing to The Palisadoes Foundation in 2024, marking the start of my open-source journey. Although I wasn’t selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that year, I continued my journey as an intern at Palisadoes, which significantly strengthened my technical foundation. In 2025, I applied again and was successfully selected as a GSoC contributor.

Project overview​

My project focused on enhancing the Talawa platform’s event management system by adding full support for recurring events, event action items, and volunteer coordination. The work involved both backend (talawa-api) and frontend (talawa-admin) improvements, introducing advanced features to simplify event scheduling, improve community engagement, and support complex recurring patterns.

Technically, the project required:

  • Designing new database schemas for recurring events and associated entities (using Drizzle ORM).
  • Implementing background workers and cron jobs for automatic event generation and cleanup.
  • Updating GraphQL mutations and resolvers for flexible CRUD operations.
  • Building frontend interfaces to allow users to create, edit, and manage recurring events, volunteers, and action items intuitively.

Project recap​

Throughout the summer, I:

  • Implemented recurring event creation, updates, deletions, and instance management.
  • Added cron-based event generation and cleanup workflows.
  • Integrated action item management for both series and individual event instances.
  • Developed the volunteer and volunteer group management system with per-instance exceptions.
  • Contributed both backend and frontend implementations to achieve full feature parity.

This work collectively elevated the Talawa platform’s event management capabilities to an enterprise-grade standard.

Completed work​

Events​

Event Action Items​

Event Volunteers and Volunteer Groups​

Event Attendance​

Current state​

By the end of GSoC 2025:

  • Recurring events are fully functional across backend and frontend.
  • Volunteer management supports both series-wide and per-instance configurations.
  • Action items can be inherited, overridden, or defined per instance.
  • Background jobs ensure automatic generation and cleanup of event instances.
  • All related GraphQL resolvers, mutations, and UI workflows have been tested and merged.

Talawa’s event module is now stable, feature-rich, and ready for production deployment.

What remains​

Future work may include:

  • Further optimizing cron job performance.
  • Fixing and refining issues related to event tags, venue management, and certain design aspects of the events interface.

These remaining improvements will be opened as new contribution opportunities for other community members to continue enhancing Talawa’s event system.

Challenges and lessons learned​

Some challenges included:

  • Designing a robust data model for recurring events that supported editing, splitting, and deletion without data loss.
  • Managing instance synchronization when templates changed (e.g., “this and following” updates).
  • Balancing backend efficiency with frontend usability for complex recurrence logic.

Key lessons learned:

  • Open-source collaboration requires clear communication and detailed PR documentation.
  • Incremental development and frequent testing are crucial for large architectural changes.
  • Working with real-world production systems taught me the importance of backward compatibility and data consistency.

Conclusion​

This GSoC journey was incredibly rewarding — it not only strengthened my technical and problem-solving skills but also deepened my understanding of large-scale open-source collaboration.

I’d like to thank my mentors and contributors from The Palisadoes Foundation for their constant support and guidance. Their feedback helped me grow as both a developer and a collaborator.

I’m proud to have contributed to Talawa’s evolution and look forward to continuing my open-source journey beyond GSoC.