Open source
Working in someone else's codebase is the closest thing to the job itself: you inherit conventions you did not choose, you defend your design to a maintainer, and the bar for merging is theirs, not yours.
20
PRs merged
3
Organisations
GSoC
2026, Apache
Google Summer of Code 2026
Apache Fory · Mentor: Chaokun Yang · Both PRs merged into apache/main
Apache Fory is a blazingly-fast multi-language serialization framework. I started in the Dart runtime in early 2026 with performance and correctness work, and by May was selected for Google Summer of Code to own gRPC code generation for Dart and Swift in Fory's IDL compiler.
A passing test is not evidence the fix belongs where you put it.
A Java↔Swift interop failure surfaced as an out-of-bounds error deep in Java's reference reader. My first fix was on the Java side and it worked. My mentor pointed out that Rust and C++ interoperate with Java without any Java change, so the divergence had to be in Swift. He was right. Reverting a working fix to find the correct one was the most valuable lesson of the project.
Prove a fix by breaking it.
I now revert every fix and confirm the new test fails before trusting it. That caught a regression test of my own that did not actually reproduce the bug it was written to guard.
Structural parity is not behavioural parity.
Comparing my generator's shape against the already-merged languages found nothing. Almost every review finding was about degenerate input: an empty service, an unusable method name, two type names colliding after normalisation, two generated modules sharing a thread.
The Apache Software Foundation
Serialization performance and correctness in the Dart runtime, then gRPC code generation for Dart and Swift in the IDL compiler.
feat(compiler): add gRPC support for Swift
GSoC deliverable. 32 files, +2,543 lines. Per-thread Fory runtime, symbol-collision preflight, ThreadSanitizer concurrency suite.
feat(compiler): add Dart gRPC codegen
GSoC deliverable. 26 files, +2,287 lines. All four gRPC shapes across all three IDL frontends.
perf(dart): typed-container write fast path with scan elimination
Removes the per-element type scan on homogeneous containers.
docs(dart): update Dart benchmark docs
perf(dart): optimize struct deserialize with direct dispatch codegen
Replaces dynamic dispatch on the hot deserialization path with generated direct calls.
feat(dart): introduce id-based enum serialization
Enums travel as stable ids rather than names, so renaming a case no longer breaks the wire format.
refactor(dart): merge all runtime exceptions into fory_exception.dart
feat(dart): add configurable deserialization size guardrails
Bounds allocation from untrusted input, so a hostile length prefix can no longer exhaust memory.
Zulip
Zulip's Flutter client is a large, carefully reviewed open-source codebase. Most of my work there was internationalisation correctness: making the message list, content rendering, emoji and autocomplete behave properly under right-to-left layouts, plus authentication-flow fixes for LDAP and email-auth-disabled realms.
login: show password form if LDAP is enabled
login: hide email/password fields if email auth is disabled
typeahead: show pronouns in @-mention and New DM lists
autocomplete: use directional alignment for autocomplete results
emoji: use directional alignment for Unicode emoji on iOS
msglist: use directional positioning for ScrollToBottomButton
compose: insert global time
msglist: fix recipient header date alignment for RTL layouts
icons: add matchTextDirection to directional icons
action_sheet: use directional border radius for reaction buttons
content: use directional layout for message media
content: use directional layout for block quotations
emoji: ensure consistent row height for plain-text emoji theme
msglist: use directional positioning for unread marker in RTL
Collate
Found while building DataPulse against a StarRocks source: table comments were not being surfaced because the connector was not reading them from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.
Still contributing to Apache Fory beyond the program, picking up open issues across the project rather than only the areas I built.
github.com/yash-agarwa-l