A Brief Introduction

Hey Everyone!

I'm Nakshatra Piplad, a third-year undergraduate student at the Department of Civil Engineering, IIT Kharagpur, currently pursuing a dual degree in Civil Engineering.

This blog marks the beginning of a series where I document my experiences, progress, and challenges throughout my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. I've always wanted to maintain a technical blog, but each time, I gave up shortly after starting. Whether it was due to waning interest or the voices in my head that said, "who even reads this?", I never stuck with it. This time, however, I want things to be different. I'm using this as an opportunity. GSoC offers plenty of material to write about, and the ongoing nature of the project will help keep the momentum going.

This blog will be my journal for this summer. I hope to detail what I work on, the issues I encounter, how I resolve them, and what I plan next. This place will not only be helpful for me to document my progress, but it may also help as a resource for future contributors who might find themselves confused or lost, just as I was.

There is so much to unpack in GSoC. From technical deep dives to communication strategies. And maybe, just maybe, by writing regularly, I'll also become a better communicator.

Why I chose DeepForest

I chose to work with DeepForest under the NumFOCUS umbrella organization for simple reasons. DeepForest focuses on detecting tree crowns using deep learning, which helped me in a project earlier. My initial exposure to the library came during an institute-level hackathon, where I had the chance to use it.

I was also interested in being a part of GSoC 2025. So later, when I discovered that DeepForest was part of the GSoC program, it felt like a logical next step. I already had some familiarity with the library, and combining that with my goal of being a GSoC contributor made it an obvious choice.

Once I decided to pursue DeepForest for my GSoC project, I began to familiarize myself more deeply with its codebase. I actively started using GitHub, exploring issues, reading documentation, and engaging with the community. Setting up the library was my first technical task. Thankfully, the setup process was smooth and well-documented, which allowed me to jump into exploratory tasks fairly quickly.

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