GSSoC 2020: A journey of 92 Days
Are you a newbie and want to contribute to Open Source? But don’t know where to start? Are you scared to open your first pull request in a project or still stuck in the murkiness of ideas?
So, this blog is exactly what you are looking for….
Introduction to GSSoC
GirlScript Summer of Code is the 3 month-long Open Source program during summers conducted by GirlScript Foundation, started in 2018, intending to help beginners get started with open source development while encouraging diversity. Throughout the program, participants contribute to different projects under the guidance of experienced mentors. And also to motivate and gear up the contributions, the top participants are awarded various exciting goodies and opportunities.
Let’s dive in the ocean of opportunities….
On the day of 22nd Jan, the mentor/participant registration period began. And soon after the registration closed, the selected list of projects that covered a wide variety of tech stack was announced on the GSSoC website so that going through those several projects and choosing the project which matched my tech stack became more accessible.
From the list of amazingly challenging and tempting projects, I choose cosmos, honestly feeling it was quite hard but it had a vast range of issues that made my journey interesting.
Cosmos is an umbrella project at OpenGenus that deals with Algorithms and Data Structures specifically and Computer Science in general. OpenGenus is sponsored by GitHub, DigitalOcean and Discourse.
After that, I was eagerly waiting for the selection mail. On 23rd Feb, I got my selection mail and that was an enchanting moment for me🤩.
As we all know, we all need someone who inspires us to do better than we know
And here, that role was played by a community of excellent members and mentors.
Community Bonding Period Begins: As soon as I joined the GSSoC Slack channel, I was able to get in touch with the admins and mentors, they made understanding the tech stack and getting intimate with the codebase easier. This not only made understanding easier but also boosted my confidence. The best and the most applauding part was that we were free to contact mentors or admin and can discuss at any time. This helped me to make the best contributions without any hassle.
Someone well said “No pain No gain”.
In the beginning, I was unaware of git commands and didn’t know about the workflow of GitHub. But when I started working on my GitHub skills, it became a child’s play for me and with every day passing, I become more efficient and self-reliant. To make our task more manageable, Issues were labelled as “beginner”, “easy”, “medium” and“hard”. Then I opened my first Pull Request and I was exhilarated when it got merged🎉 .
Try to explore things and get your path :)
Whenever my pull request was merged, it challenged and inspired me to do more. Each time I was encouraged for my contributions, it motivated me to increase my participation within the community. This was because I felt like my contributions were making a variation.
Following this, we proceeded to our second scope of contribution which was more focused on our interests. The focus of that contribution was to enable us to learn new ideas in depth. We drafted articles explaining very exciting topics in our expressions, which inflicted us a better experience. We were offered the internship program. Soon, those articles got published in OpenGenusIQ.
During these 3 months, I got heaps of opportunities by interacting with the members, mentors and the students of the community. So it’s worth applying and getting selected. I had a wondrous learning and growing experience of my entire life😄 .
Link to my articles -https://iq.opengenus.org/begin-and-end-array-cpp/
