KWOC | Kharagpur Winter of Code Final Report
About KWOC
KWOC or Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program for the students of various colleges across the country who are new to open source software development.
I had heard about open source contributions before but every time I tried to get my hands dirty, I got intimidated. Sometimes it was hard to find the right project and sometimes the code written by some other was too hard to comprehend. That’s when I came to know about KWOC by one of my senior who had himself participated in it a year before and had a very sound experience. I was not much confident but I thought to give it a shot anyways and that shot proved to be very fruitful.
Choosing the project
The first thing was to choose a project to contribute to the next 5 weeks. I was well versed with javascript and began searching for the projects in it. I found soundHaven under Nityananda Gohain who was very helpful throughout the tenure.
SoundHaven is a native cross-platform music player.
Built using Angular 5 and Electron. Single code base but can be built for a different platform (Mac Os, Linux, windows etc).
Getting Started
First of all, I joined the gitter channel and contacted my mentor and expressed my willingness to work on the project which he readily accepted. I had worked on various projects in Angular before and was well versed with version control but had no idea about Electron.
I began searching online and found a few tutorials and first got a bit confident in working with the electron. Time was slipping fast so I started analyzing the project for issues or bugs.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
- PR#43 For solving issue #42
The issue was When there is no song in the sidebar, still, it shows a heart. #42. I solved it with a simple use of *ngIf. - PR#46 For solving the issues #41 and #45
Issue#41: Play the song on its own after selecting it from the file or folder
Issue#45: Play songs by selecting them from the sidebar. - PR#48 A pull request to solve the major and minor design issues
There were many design issues and the app was a bit less user-friendly so I made the necessary changes which were accepted by Nitya with this.
4. PR#51 Delete option integrated on the sidebar
5. PR#53 Updated the #README
As said, “A great README file helps your project to stand out from the sea of open-source software on GitHub.”
I never gave much attention to the readme of my projects but the truth is writing a good readme is as important as the project. I wrote a scenario of the whole project for a particular user and included required screenshots for user simplicity.
CONCLUSION
So, all in all, it was a great experience participating in KWOC, contributing to “Sound-Haven” and working under Nitya who helped me every time whether it was merging a PR, searching a new issue, KWOC related problem or resources for learning.
I got introduced to various aspects of programming and most of all I got familiar at reading and working with other people’s codes.It gives me immense delight and zeal to do more after seeing my name on the leaderboard.
So, I am very grateful to Kharagpur open source society as they organized such an awesome event for letting developers like us to get familiar with the open source realm.
