Outreachy and Kinto

One of my close friends told me about the Outreachy program. Ever since I heard about Outreachy, I wanted to participate in it. I didn’t know if I had it in me but there was one thing I knew, I wanted to get selected for it really badly.

Outreachy is an initiative of the Software Freedom Conservancy open to participation for women, transgenders and other under-represented communities. Through Outreachy, free and open source organizations select interns to work remotely for 3 months on a project under the guidance of a mentor. The present round of Outreachy internships will go on from Dec. 2016 — March 2017. For more information — you can visit https://www.gnome.org/outreachy .

Back in September, I started contributing to Kinto. Kinto is a minimalist JSON storage service with synchronization and sharing abilities. It is used and developed at Mozilla and released under the Apache v2 licence.

A couple of points on why Kinto is super awesome! :

• Kinto lets you focus on writing great user-facing interfaces and takes care of storing, sharing and synchronizing your application state with multiple devices or users.
• It is often a big deal for developers to develop web APIs that handle CORS, are secure, respect users privacy by supporting encryption when building applications that work offline, store data remotely, and synchronise across devices. Existing solutions either rely on big corporations that crave user data, or require a non-trivial amount of time and expertise to develop a new server for every new project.
• We want to help developers focus on their business logic and value proposition, and we don’t want the challenge of storing user data or developing backends to get in their way. The path between a new idea and deploying to production should be short!
• Also, we are firm believers of the fact that data belongs to users, and not necessarily to the application authors. Applications should be decoupled from the storage location, and users should be able to choose where their personal data is stored.
• The backend can often be universal, generic and reusable. We envision mutualisation of services and self-hosting: the backend is deployed, secured and scaled only once for several applications, which is amazing!

So, the next time you’re looking for storage options for that wonderful app you’re creating, consider Kinto. It’s super easy to use and host.

For people looking to start contributing to Open Source and free software or people who’ve been doing it since forever or for someone in between, there’s no place better than Kinto. You’ll find well-labelled issues, the code is well-documented and well-maintained. If you still get stuck, you’ll have fellow contributors to the rescue. Everyone is super helpful and loves Kinto.

When I first started contributing, I had faced some issues while installing some stuff and one of the maintainers, shared my screen on appear.in to help me successfully install it. Yes, they go that extraaa mile to help everyone! Every contribution I made was challenging, taught me something new, from writing tests to CRUD methods to flake8 formats and there were people to help me when I was stuck :)

I applied for Outreachy and now I’m working on Kinto’s project as a Mozilla intern. My project consists of developing a Push Service for Kinto.

I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about my project, and things will surely go a bit technical from this point, so stay tuned. :D