My voyage through Open Source
The power of Open Source is the power of the people. The people rules. — Phillippe Kahn
It’s been quite a long time , I have been contributing to Open Source and it has proved to be a boon in my career.
I am currently a mentor in Google Summer of Code 2020 in Public Lab under DIAL Foundation. Also, a GirlScript Summer of Code Mentor .Without further ado , I will directly get started with my jouney.
TL;DR : It will be long , but I assure you won’t be bore 😅
Competitions
- “It starts with one thing, I don’t know why” and I started my Open Source journey through HacktoberFest in October 2018 . One fine day , I received mail from freeCodeCamp regarding an event named HacktoberFest where on merging 5PRs I will receive a T-shirt. Just like another kid I made my contribution even without having much knowledge on Git.
Later, I familiarized myself with Git VCS and GitHub to be precise.
2. GirlScript Summer of Code 2019( March -May 2019) : The biggest open source coding competition in India .This competition helped me to know how real software development works in developers community throughout the world. I have written a blog about my GSSoC Journey here — GSSoC 2019 : An anecdote. I contributed to two major projects Techtonica/curriculum and Mathball and was one of the Top Contributors ( 25th all over India) .
Thanks to Alina Lodahl and Priyabrata Biswas who helped me throughout this venture.
In the mean time I came to know about Google Summer of Code and Summer Of Code In Space(SOCIS) Competition during GSSoC.
GSoC 2019 : I went through codebase of one organisation but I didn’t found someone to help me out in locally setting up their codebase (as they were filled with bugs) .I even tried with other orgs but I failed to contribute.As a result I couldn’t move forward in GSoC that year.
SOCIS 2019 : Unlucky competition indeed 😢. My proposal got selected by my mentor but the project didn’t passed the pretest and got funding from European Space Agency . As I received a full time office Internship in my summer , I couldn’t work further on the project even if I wished too.
I realised that in order to contribute better, I should join an organisation which will help me in becoming a good open source developer.
Public Lab ❤️
This is where my real open source journey started
I started off contributing to it by fixing an UI issue ( a noob one indeed 😅). Later I went through various repos(projects) of PL and they were quite fascinating to me. From community tool box to plots2 and many more, I started solving isssues and adding up features.
After joining the Public Lab organisation , I realised the same 👇
Later in the month of November , I came to know about Google Code-in Competition which is an open source competition for the pre university students. I fulfilled all the criterias and got the opportunity to mentor in that competition.
3.Google CodeIn(Mentor)[Nov. 2019 — Jan. 2020 ] : I started creating issues for the GCI students and was actively mentoring and reviewing the tasks done by the students.
I reviewed 25+ PRs and created 20+ issues ( including two check-ins) during that time.
At the end of GCI, I and few other mentors received a PL Kit 🤩 for our valuable contribution in GCI.
4.JGEC Winter of Code( Organiser)[Dec. 2019 — March 2020]: After participating in so many competitions, I realised that I need to help my colllege mates as well in Open Source. I and my friends organised an open source coding competition named JGEC Winter of Code similar to that of KWoC,IIT Kharagpur and NWoC, IIT Patna .
Though this was the first time we organised such event in our college , yet it got great accredetion from all over the country and specially from the alumnus of my college. We had 200+ ( including students from IITs, NITs,DTU,JU and IIIT) students registered in this competition and many software engineers ,working professionals participated as Mentor for the same.Special thanks to my friend Shivam Kumar Jha who helped me initially to orgnaise the event in our college.
Well, till this time I had ample amount of contribution in PL to go for GSoC, so I thought to apply this time as student. I started working on a project and writing proposal.But, then Google selected our org as sub-org under DIAL this year. It was very dishearting for me as well as org. Somehow I still thought to give it a try. On one certain day, I received the message (at the mid of march) from our org admin that we being a sub org won’t be able to mentor the project this year I was working on for GSoC having very less slot.
In the mean time , I went through project list of other org as well(as I knew getting into GSoC as student in sub org specially will be very difficult). I went through other org project tried to connect with mentors there, but I didn’t find them as active as that of ours. But they didn’t help me out about the project I was willing to write a proposal (Project Idea on the website is of Frontend Project, but the project needs to be completely work on Apache Backend 😑)
Honestly, that day was one of the worst days in my life realising I cannot get into GSoC as a student . But then my organisation be like :
Seeing no option to become a Student Developer this year, I thought to mentor in GSoC this year and filled the form ( not being a previous GSoC student though).
And finally at the last day of GSoC proposal submission(31st March 2020),I received the invitation. 🎊
End Note
Open Source is a development methdoolgy; free software is a movement — Richard Stallman
Contributing to Open Source has brought forward bestowal in many forms from dev events to technical interviews from top tech companies( will write an Interview Experience as well with them , once I make it).
At a situation where the whole world is working remotely, software development has completely shifted to open source. Well, you don’t need to be an expert to contribute to Open Source.Even your smallest contribution can make great difference .
What 👇
Feel free to reach out to me for any help.
Your’s pydevsg 💻
