404 Not Found
A journey of finding series of events along the way of open source contribution to reach in top 10 contestants out of 2500+ participants and becoming top performer of a project.
GirlScript Summer Of Code was my first open source contribution platform, so I was bit scared of what should be done, how to contribute, but eager as well to learn new things. Being a final year student there was bit pressure as everyone around me started earlier, but good thing I had the skills which were required in various projects such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ReactJs because I have worked individually on several projects. It’s a misconception that one cannot be able to contribute if he/she doesn’t know development. Well I saw plenty of basic language projects which you can work on (based on data structures and algorithms) and along the way you can learn many things on your own as well as mentors are always ready to help you. This platform will provide you to step out of your comfort zone and work on different projects, based on different language and explore.
How I started my journey?
Once we get selected, we are asked to join the slack channel where we can see all the projects and interact with mentors, if there’s any doubt regarding the project. I short listed the projects according to technology I have been working on and joined their channel for updates. A week later, we can start contributing to the projects so I started with looking for issues.
I was assigned 2 issues (Ignitus Client and Techtonica/curriculum) which I completed in a week. I use to keep a track of all the active PR’s, scores and commits. “Here comes a not found moment”.
What I found?
There is a profile page designed by the team for all the participants of GSSOC in which you type your username and you get to know about every pull request the user is working on along with detailed graph and commits. Pretty cool right ?
Things were going well, I was working on various projects simultaneously. I always use to keep a track of upcoming project issues and commented as soon as possible on issues so that it would be assigned to me. But something wasn’t going right as I saw my peer’s profiles, they were contributing as well as their score was constantly increasing. “Here comes a not found moment.”
What I found ?
Viewing the issues and profile and Boom !!!, I finally figured the way out. I come to know about opening issues.
Yes, we create bugs or new features to be added on the project which not only helps in the improvement of project but also increases one’s debugging and testing skills. Once approved by the mentor of the project, the issue is usually assigned to you, if you are willing to work on it. There after I use to find errors of different projects such as -:
1) Some functionally not working. Clicking on various buttons, links etc.
2) CSS box model issues. Overflowing contents configured after inspecting elements.
3) Responsive view
Finally my score accelerate, became the top performer of Techtonica Project, in which we had to write MD files with detailed explanation of the topics along with guided practice and examples, to scoring a perfect score of 404. I conclude this by summarizing about what I learnt along the journey.
1) A healthy competition is always a good thing. You watch you learn and you grow.
2) Debugging is such an important skill to have as a developer. Spending hours on finding new bug/feature helped me clarify various concepts.
3) “One person’s scrappy work is another man’s full time job.” Concentrate over quality than quantity. Try to test out various scenarios of your code before submitting it.
4) Ask for what you deserve — There were moments where I felt that the PR’s had low difficulties (means lesser points will be allotted) according to the work that has to be done. So I used to request the mentor if they could upgrade it. Sometimes they did !!!
PS:- For those who didn’t understand the relevance of the title — 404 is a HTTP response from the server when a client requests for data through an API and the path provide is incorrect. So the result comes out be 404 Not Found. Similarly along the journey I found the “not found” paths.
