📅 January 24, 2025 – Discovery of Scala Center

Every research journey has that “aha!” moment—when all the scattered threads align into a clear direction.

Mine came on January 24, 2025, when I discovered the Scala Center.

🔎 Finding the Perfect Fit

After days of browsing GSoC organizations, one name stood out—not just for its projects, but for its philosophy:

💬 “Empowering the Scala ecosystem through collaboration, innovation, and education.”

I clicked into their profile, explored their proposed ideas, and that’s when I found it—LLM4S: Large Language Models for Scala.

It wasn’t just a project. It was a mission to bridge AI and functional programming with Scala’s powerful ecosystem. And as someone deeply interested in NLP and AI tooling, I instantly felt a connection.

🧠 Why Scala Center Resonated

Here’s what sealed the deal for me:

🔹 The Scala Center is not a typical company—
It’s a non-profit backed by EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), designed to support Scala and open-source collaboration.

🔹 Their ideas were well-scoped, high-impact, and relevant to current trends like LLMs, functional programming, and developer productivity.

🔹 The community was active, inclusive, and transparent—I quickly found their Discord server, where maintainers and contributors were openly discussing ideas and welcoming newcomers.

💥 My Reaction

It felt like everything I’d been researching finally clicked into place.

🎯 “This is it. This is where I want to contribute.”

I added Scala Center and LLM4S to the top of my shortlist and started diving deeper into their ecosystem—checking their GitHub repos, previous GSoC work, and the vision behind LLM4S.

💬 Reflections

If you’re going through the GSoC organization list right now, keep your eyes open not just for “cool projects”, but for alignment—with your passions, your values, and the kind of developer you aspire to become.

✨ Discovering Scala Center wasn’t just a research win—it was the moment my GSoC vision became personal.