An Open Source Workshop by Tapasweni Pathak

The workshop was very impressive and got to learn new things about open source contribution through web-hosted version control systems like Github, GitLab etc.

Version control is mainly based on the concept of maintaining historic checkpoints of your source code that is available to all.

Open source is necessary in the sense as it saves a lot of development time as many developers living in different locations can work on the same project, saves cost, improves flexibility and removes chances of conflicts.

Basic steps to contribute to an open source project:

1 Choose a project after creating an account on GitHub or any web-hosted version control platform and install Git on your system.

2 Look into the issues after reading the README.md and fork it to your own repository.

3 Clone the repo to your local repository on your system and make changes.

git clone /path/to/repository

4 Commit the changes to your repo using git commands.

git add <filename> or git add * (for loading all files to staging area)

git commit -m “Commit message”

5 Push the changes to your remote repository(GitHub).

git push origin master

6 Create a Pull request after reading the requirements. If the owner of the repository accepts your changes, they will be merged with the owner’s repository.

During the workshop, I forked the Voice Calculator project and made some README fixes to it and created a pull request. I have got some experience working with Android development and thus I wanted to contribute to an open source Android project. Apparently, I went on choosing this project and I made my first contribution.

The workshop could have been better if some requirements regarding installations would have been told earlier. That would have saved a lot of time.

This is the link to all Open Source Internships that I found very useful.

Thanks to Tapasweni ma’am for her immense guidance throughout the workshop.