Before the Code Comes the Community :A GSoC Bonding Reflection

Tuesdays, Zoom, two mentors, and a project that finally made sense.

The first time I opened the OpenMRS Slack workspace, the sidebar had more channels than I had brain cells. I scrolled, blinked, and scrolled again. Somewhere in the middle of that scroll, I made a decision i am doing this!

I’m Raj, a GSoC 2026 contributor with OpenMRS, and for the next several months I’ll be building the Audit Log Dashboard — a small but kind of important microfrontend that answers one deceptively simple question inside an OpenMRS instance: who changed what, and when?

In healthcare software, an audit trail isn’t garnish. It’s how trust gets built into the system. A clinician needs to know that if anything in a patient’s record changes, there’s a clean, queryable story behind it.

But before any of the building, there was the bonding. And before the bonding, there was a lot of polite confusion.

What community bonding actually looked like

I’d heard about community bonding before I got in, and honestly, I half-expected it to be a string of intro calls. “Hi, nice to meet you,” followed by “Great, see you when coding starts.” That’s not what it was.

The Tuesday rhythm. Every Tuesday, like clockwork, I’d have a zoom meet with my mentors. Same day, same vibe. Three people on a call, one project taking shape between us. Tuesdays became the only day of the week with a job description.

The demo. Early on, I built a demo — not the final product, , just enough to prove I understood the shape of what we were making. We walked through it together. Mentors poked at it. I learned which of my assumptions were right and which were wishful thinking. I came in thinking it was a presentation. It turned out to be a friendly cross-examination — the kind that makes your code better.

Architectural decisions, validated. There were a handful of those “should we do it this way or that way?” calls. I’d come in with a proposal, sometimes confidently, sometimes less so. Oliver and Manoj would either nod, or ask the one question that turned my proposal inside out. Both reactions were useful. Honestly, the inside-out ones more so.

Backend bugs, figured out. A few backend issues showed up while wiring the dashboard to the auditlogweb module. We poked at them together until they made sense.

By the end of bonding, the project wasn’t a vague proposal anymore. It was a crystal-clear picture in my head, with the edges defined and the unknowns labeled.

And maybe more importantly — I walked out of bonding with confidence. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that comes from knowing two senior engineers have looked at your plan and said “yeah, go.”

My relationship with bugs, accurately.

Oliver and Manoj

I want to be specific about this part, because “thanks to my mentors” is the kind of line that gets skimmed past, and these two deserve better than skimmed.

Both Oliver and Manoj were the reason I reached clarity on this project as quickly as I did. Every time I came in with a half-baked idea or a question I wasn’t sure how to ask, they helped me untangle it — patiently!

A lot of the direction the project has now? That came from those Tuesday calls. So, Oliver and Manoj ,thank you!

Where I am now

The coding period is starting. The fog has lifted. I know what I’m building, why I’m building it, who to ping when I’m stuck, and roughly which Tuesdays will save my week. For the first time in months, the project lives in my head as a diagram and not as a vibe.

If you want to contribute to OpenMRS read this

A small open letter, if you’ll let me:

Start before applications open. Open a PR. Say hi on OpenMRS Talk. Read other contributors’ past proposals — they’re a free masterclass that nobody charges you for. Healthcare context matters more than you think; learn what an EMR does before you start optimizing how it does it.

The community is kinder than you think. Show up consistently and they’ll show up for you. And when you do get in: don’t waste the bonding. The Tuesdays add up.

If you applied and didn’t get selected read this too

I see you. This part is for you.

GSoC is one door, not the building. Your proposal already made you a contributor — the org saw your work, and that fact doesn’t expire just because the email didn’t go your way.

The people who get picked next year are, almost without exception, the people who didn’t disappear after this year. Stay in the channels. Open the next PR. That’s the actual differentiator. Quietly, that’s all of it.

Community bonding ended on paper. In practice, it just stopped having a name.

— Raj, building the Audit Log Dashboard for GSoC 2026 @ OpenMRS.

you can connect me on linkedin(https://www.linkedin.com/in/raj-prakash-008a6231a/)

github(https://github.com/RajPrakash681)