GSoC 2025 - Week 0 - Community Bonding

Welcome to my GSoC Journey

This week marks the beginning of my GSoC 2025 adventure with The Linux Foundation, working on integrating meta-ros with Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). The community bonding period is crucial - it’s when we transition to a active contributor in an open-source community.

Meeting My Mentors

Jan-Simon Möller and Walt Miner from AGL and Rob Woolley from the ROS community have been incredibly welcoming and patient with all my initial questions. Our first video call was enlightening, they provided context about AGL’s current state, the challenges with ROS integration, and realistic expectations for the project scope.

Key insights from mentor discussions:

• AGL’s current focus and versioning
• ROS’s and meta-ros establishments and versionings
• The importance of development through Gerrit
• Hardware considerations for automotive embedded systems

Joining the AGL Community

Weekly Developer Calls

I started attending the AGL Weekly Developer Calls, these happen every Thursday, we got introduced with the community, and the maintainers and listened to the goldmine of information from everyone. The community is very welcome the newcomers.

You can find the calendar here, it is open to all!

The Weekly Developer Call is for all developers engaging or to be engaged with the AGL community, additional to this, we had a weekly GSoC catch-ups with our mentors and other students with their mentors. Here I got to learn about other candidates, their approaches and much more.

For me, I asked for a 2 day face-to-face call with my mentors, which they agreed to without any issue, there we discussed issues and analysed about what all we can do in scope of our project.

Community Engagement Highlights

• Mostly spent listening and understanding the terminology
• Asked a few questions about builds, ROS, etc.

Project Scope

One important lesson during the community bonding period was that, after being selected for GSoC, the proposal you submitted can evolve significantly. During this period, we explored many aspects of the project before reaching a solid starting point for integrating the two technologies. There were numerous debates, but in the end, we found a common ground.

The community bonding period has been invaluable for understanding not just the technical challenges, but the collaborative processes that make open-source projects successful. I’m excited to start the hands-on development work!

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Week 0 Summary: Foundation laid, community connections established, technical environment prepared.

Get Involved

Stay tuned for the detailed technical deep-dives in the upcoming blog posts. I am planning to include examples, code, etc, such that anyone can follow along with it.

Have questions about automotive software development or want to collaborate on open-source automotive projects? Reach out to me on my email

Next: Week 1,2: Hardware Setup and Initial Build Environment
Journey: GSoC 2025 Journey