GSSoC’18 — My Journey in the wonderland of Open Source
Past 3 months have been an exciting journey for me in the wonderland of open source. During this period I contributed to an interesting project, worked on many fascinating APIs and got a chance to interact with many developers.
About GSSoC’18
GSSoC’18 is India’s first women-oriented technical festival but is open for all. It is a 3-month long program aimed at promoting Open Source Software development. When I read about GSSoC over social media I was pretty fascinated by the initiative and applied for it immediately.
GSSoC started officially on 23rd June, but before that, we had to go through the projects and select the ones we were interested in contributing to. GSSoC consisted of lots of interesting projects in various domains. I went through each of them, their tech stack and finally selected project Travel Mate.
About Travel Mate
Travel mate is an android app provides solutions for every possible problem a traveller might face during the course of his or her entire journey. The app provides users with various features from choosing the correct destination to easily organizing the trip. During GSSoC, I worked on the server end of the app building REST API using Django rest framework.
My Contributions
Since I had also participated in open source contribution event named Kharagpur Winter of Code ( Read my experience of KWoC Here )earlier, it was easy for me to get started. I picked up some easy issues to get acquainted with the codebase . After getting familiar with the codebase I picked more challenging issues. In the next 2 months, I worked upon various issues, added multiple new features as well as fixed some existing bugs.
Some of the key components I worked upon —
- Coded to cache API response & put throttle limits to API request.
- Build notification and analytics module from scratch.
- Integrated Github, Twitter, and Wikipedia API.
Here is the link of all my contributions to the project.
All in all, it was a great learning experience for me. I learned a lot about building REST API using Django rest framework. I explored APIs of various platforms and learned how to integrate them. I get acquainted with some amazing tools which include Postman, Travis etc. I got familiar with many exciting Git & Github features specially rebase. Moreover, I got a chance to work in a team & collaborate with other developers.
GSSoC’18 was truly an enthralling journey. I would like to thanks my mentor Prabhakar Gupta for being helpful and encouraging me to perform at my best. I would also like to thank the whole team of GirlScript for organizing such a great event and for taking an initiative to spread awareness of open source.
Hi if we haven’t met before, My self Mohit Khandelwal, final year undergrad and passionate developer from IET-DAVV Indore. Follow me on Linkedin or on Github.
