Journey with Open Source
Starting with your first code commit in the world of open source is always a challenge, but it is more challenging to maintain the regular code contributions. Remember you are not doing it right if you are not overcoming your challenges daily.
My journey started nearly two years back with my project based on Angular JS and PHP. After, doing some projects, I felt confident in Angular JS and started searching open source organizations. The easiest method, I came across that time was to go through the list that appeared in Google Summer Of Code.
It was challenging to setup the projects. I searched a simple website based on Jekyll under the organization FOSSASIA. I searched about Jekyll a bit which has helped me to setup the project on my local machine.
First Issue/PR
Your first Issue/PR story is always unique and exciting. I opened a simple CSS padding issue:
https://github.com/fossasia/gci15.fossasia.org/issues/165
I was asked to close my first PR at that time as I messed up with commits. The learning is always important.
I did the PR again https://github.com/fossasia/gci15.fossasia.org/pull/204/files which then finally got merged.
Google Summer Of Code
After contributing a month, I explored more to find out some potential projects.
Luckily, I got a project based on AngularJS. Building the project was fun this time, as I knew it would not work at first go.
Woah, the codebase was too large, I was seeing the modular code of that level for the first time.
I started making pictorial representations to understand the whole workflow of the project.
Finally, I made some potential code contributions by providing a customTwitter Wall which was using loklak to fetch tweets without taking any Twitter permissions.
The confidence was increasing with each PR, and finally, I submitted a proposal for this project and got selected.
The GSoC journey was incredible; the most interesting part apart from code was making friends around the world. Currently, I am working with CloudCV on a project EvalAI and mentoring GSoC students under FOSSASIA community.
You can read many similar posts with the title “How can I start with Open Source,” but the easiest choice, in my opinion, is to learn from others experiences and start working as soon as possible.
“Don’t wait, make your first effort today.”
