GSSoC’20 -A remarkable end to a heuristic journey!

.

What exactly is GSSoC!?

GSSoC stands for GirlScript Summer of Code. It is the 3 month-long Open Source program during summers conducted by GirlScript Foundation, started in 2018, with an aim 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. Top participants get exciting goodies and opportunities.

In 2020, GSSoC extended its reach to :

1. No. of Participants : 2552
2. No. of Mentors : 135
3. No. of Projects :30
4. No. of Project Admin : 31

GirlScript Summer of Code 2020

I accidentally came across GSSoC while surfing my LinkedIn and then even came across the same on my college whats-app group. I had no knowledge about GitHub and since it was for beginners, I decided to start my open source journey from right here. Without further ado, I filled the form and soon got selected as a participant. This was the mail I was waiting from the day I filled the form. So, naturally, on receiving the same, I was very elated and excited to begin my journey.

This email made my day🎉✨.

I immediately went through the project stack and decided to contribute to 2 projects.

1. Algo_Ds_Notes
2. Cosmos

So, to begin with, I saw some tutorials on YouTube and then when I tried creating my first pr, I accidentally initialized git on my desktop via git init. This ruined the entire starting point. Moreover, in most of the tutorials, commits were made on the master branch but we weren’t supposed to do so. We had to create a commit on a branch of our master branch. So, somewhere there was some connection missing and I wasn’t able to connect all the pieces of the jigsaw together and hence wasn’t able to create a proper pr. Amidst all this struggle, I came across a mentor on Gssoc slack channel. He made me realize that even though people do not know each other but we all are connected via our umbrella community — the Developer’s community and GSSoC helped me pave my way into this community. It was really helpful and guided me to re-initialize my system via a zoom meeting.

So, after various trials and errors — I finally learned how to create one on my own. During this entire journey, there were a lot of moments when I faced immense frustration. But believe me, after being stuck on one issue for days and then finally getting a solution on your own gives an altogether a different pleasure.

Sometimes, struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were to go through our life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been. Give every opportunity a chance, leave no room for regrets.

If I was able to sail throughout my journey, I would love to award most of the credit to GOOGLE. Without it, I am not even sure if I would be able to create a pr or learn anything about OPEN SOURCE.

JOURNEY ABOUT DIFFERENT PROJECTS I CONTRIBUTED IN…

1. Algo_Ds_Notes

This was the first repository in which I created a PR. The mentors here were extremely helpful. So, this was my major source of enhancing my knowledge about open source. It taught me about how to view files, edit them in Github and even about squashing my commits. Although contributing to it was not much scoring due to very less hard labels being allotted. But it was a huge pool of knowledge for beginners.

2. COSMOS

This was the second project where I contributed. This encouraged me to something which I had never imagined to do in my life i.e. writing articles on various algorithms and contributing here motivated me to write 4 articles! Thanks to our project admin who always reviewed our articles and gave important feedback which immensely helped to improve our writing skills for the next one.

Here is the link to all the articles I wrote: https://iq.opengenus.org/author/raksha/

The harder you struggle the more glorious the triumph

I am really excited to share that GSSoC Results were announced and I bagged 11th rank in Gssoc’20.

PS: If one feels that I do not know web or any development related stuff and so cannot contribute in open source, believe me, it's a wrong perception. Even if one knows only a single programming language be it java, c++, python or any other, one can. It's all about the first step :)

Thanks a lot, GirlScript for this amazing opportunity and making me a part of the same.