This is a summary of the work I did for the Zulip server and web application as a part of Google Summer of Code 2025.
Zulip: Open-source team chat with topic-based threading
Zulip combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model. With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones.
Why Zulip? - Efficient communication with organized team chat.
During GSoC 2025, I contributed to organization settings and message editing areas, and made some UI fixes.
- Commits during GSoC
- Pull requests merged during GSoC 2025
- All commits in zulip/zulip
- All merged pull requests
- Project title: Cluster of priority features focused on message editing and settings areas.
- Repository: zulip/zulip
- Mentors: Ryan Rehman, Varun Singh
- Project Size: Large
In the settings area, the following features are added:
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Users can now choose to automatically mark resolved topic notifications from the Notification Bot as read.
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Administrators can now configure a custom welcome message to be sent to new users in their organization, along with the standard onboarding messages from the Welcome Bot.
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A group-based setting to control who can start new topics in a channel.
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Setting to reset channel notifications to default.
For message editing area:
- Improve how message move and edit history is shown.
- settings: Add personal setting for marking resolved-topic notices as read.
- settings: Add option to customize channel notifications in Personal settings > Notifications.
- channel settings: Add a "Reset to default notifications" icon in settings.
- bots: Add a setting to customize the Welcome Bot message.
- org_settings: Preserve custom Welcome Bot message when testing or viewing message.
- api: Fix incorrect feature level format in zulip.yaml file.
- css: Align channel privacy icons in Personal settings > Notifications and modals.
- icons: Rename zulip-icon-mute-new to zulip-icon-mute and zulip-icon-unmute-new to zulip-icon-unmute.
- streams: Add group-based channel setting to control new topic creation.
- message_edit: Improve how message move/edit history is displayed.
- css: Let drag-to-resize expand settings textareas to panel width.
My Google Summer of Code journey with Zulip has been a truly rewarding experience. Having contributed to Zulip for over a year, it was exciting to work with such a helpful community where I could learn new things every day.
I’ve learned a lot while contributing to Zulip. The main technical things I learned were structuring my code to make it more readable, learning about Git, and understanding the importance of tests in production. Moreover, I’ve learned how to communicate my thoughts clearly and collaborate effectively, all of which have helped me grow as a developer. Collaborating with talented contributors, building new features, and engaging in code reviews have been deeply rewarding experiences.
I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Tim Abbott for his guidance, and to my mentors Ryan Rehman and Varun Singh for their feedback and support in helping me prioritize my work and detect mistakes early in my code.
I’m sincerely grateful to the entire Zulip community for making this GSoC experience filled with learning, growth, and inspiration.