Interview with Google Summer of Code Contributor Divyanshu Choudhury: “I look forward to contributing to the EBRAINS platform”

What will your Google Summer of Code project focus on and how does it relate to EBRAINS?

My project, “EBRAINS Modular Software Environments and Service Integration,” focuses on improving the flexibility and maintainability of the EBRAINS Software Distribution (ESD). The ESD is a curated, reproducible, and containerised software environment that includes a wide range of EBRAINS tools. This unified approach ensures consistency of the software environment across user-managed systems, clusters, and services, allowing researchers to run workflows seamlessly. The ESD supports a wide range of computational neuroscience tools and currently contains dozens of scientific applications and hundreds of dependencies. As the ecosystem continues to grow, creating modular and customizable software environments becomes increasingly important.

During the summer, I will be working with Python and Spack - the supercomputer package manager - to develop tooling that allows researchers and developers to create lightweight, ESD-compatible software environments while maintaining compatibility with official releases.

Can you tell us a bit about your background in computer science?

I started contributing to open source in late 2025. What initially attracted me was the opportunity to learn beyond tutorials and classroom assignments. I wanted to understand how large-scale software is actually built, maintained, and improved by developers around the world.

Over the past few months, I have contributed to a variety of open-source projects, particularly in the infrastructure and cloud-native ecosystem. One of my most rewarding experiences was contributing a major feature to OpenTelemetry C++.

I am excited to be participating in Google Summer of Code 2026 with INCF/EBRAINS. This is my first GSoC and a milestone in my open-source journey.

What drew you to the project?

What attracted me most to this project was its combination of infrastructure engineering, package management, dependency resolution, high-performance computing, and the opportunity to work on software that supports scientific research at scale.

I have been fortunate to work with an incredibly supportive mentorship team. Their support has made the onboarding process much smoother and has already helped me gain a deeper understanding of both the project and the broader EBRAINS ecosystem.

Over the coming months, I look forward to learning more about Spack, software distribution, and research infrastructure while contributing meaningful improvements to the EBRAINS platform. I hope to continue contributing to the project and the community long after Google Summer of Code concludes.