Open source with just 2 programming languages — First Years’ guide to Dev through GSSOC

Hello everyone. This is Pranav Suriya pursuing first year in Electrical and Computer engineering at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, TamilNadu.

It has always been the dream of a first-year student to contribute some things towards open source and start their journey in the field of development. When someone mentions about Open Source, the first thing that first years think about is the diverse set of programming languages to start contributing. But what if I say that Open Source is possible just with 2–3 Programming languages and that too what if it deals with UI/UX and front end…….

GirlScript Foundation has always aimed at providing its fellow mentees with a smooth platform to start coding and assigned great mentors to help the mentees. The project displayed in GSSOC are user friendly and people even with very few knowledge of coding can easily contribute. The aim of this program is purely about community bonding and learning.

When I mention about front end the first thing that strikes us is Web Development. The basics of Web Development involves HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The participant need not be a full stack developer to start contributing. Just by getting involved in these languages a person can contribute a lot towards open source.

But how can a person raise issues and get their PR’s merged just by knowing these languages :

1. Look for basic frontend issues. For example

1. Adding some cool logos to the website.

2. Enabling hyperlinks to images

3. Website redirection bugs.

4. Aligning the texts and images.

All the above issues can be solved just by knowing the basics of HTML alone.

2. Create issues which deal with the styling of the website. For this a person is expected know about CSS. For example

1. Creating navbars.

2. Creating footers.

3. Enabling text animations for heading.

4. Creating user friendly buttons to move around the website.

5. Creating forms for user messages.

3. Adding user attracting features. This includes features which draws the attention of the viewers with animations, toggling and transitions. Javascript is widely used for this purpose.

For version control and collaboration Github is used. This platform lets the participants and the project admins to work together in projects and manage what is being done in the projects from time to time. Actions like raising issues, request for merging codes, merging pull requests are easily done through Github. Now you may again get a question. Do I need to know about the Git bash commands for participation? Getting well versed in Git bash commands allows you to get your actions easily done in the git platform. But as a first year, the Git bash commands can be a bit tiresome. So for this there are also methods through which you need not even open Git bash and the whole process can be done in the Github website. But it is usually preferred to know about the Git bash commands.

Starting with these issues may appear to be simple at the beginning. But it can be observed that even these small issues will have a great impact to the websites. In my case the first PR that I merged was about making a “Navigate to Top Button”. It seemed very simple and easy at the beginning. But after my PR was merged I came to know that it was a great idea to make the Website a lot user friendly. From then a lot of issues were raised with respect to the styling of buttons. Small changes eventually add upto huge results……