My experience with the Open Humans community
As a user, Open Humans provides great user experience as it provides a single platform for users facilities to store, manage and connect all their personal data.
I started contributing to Open Humans from February 2018. My mentors were amiable and reached out to me to answer my questions and recommended me to follow the instructions mentioned in README to set up my local environment. They encouraged me to make my first contribution in the form of improving documentation in Open Humans Data Uploader and Open Humans’ Data Source Templates.
The mentors were quick in reviewing my contributions and pointing out the necessary changes. Gradually I grew comfortable with the environment and solved some UI/UX issues.
I learned the significance of a public channel and how it is more beneficial if errors and problems faced by individuals are voiced in the public channel. This imparts great help in debugging errors faced by people using different development environments which are seemingly invisible. All thanks to Mad Price Ball (@madprime) for making me realize this and pulling me out of my cocoon.
The transformation phase for me was writing tests. Earlier, I had come across tests and found it intimidating as I had seen many of my changes not passing all the test cases in open-source projects that I had contributed earlier to. I was new to Django. Writing tests seemed to be a mammoth task for a newbie like me. With the collaboration and active participation of my mentors, I wrote my first test! It was an achievement in itself and fulfilling as well.
I got to know about continuous integration services such as CodeClimate and Hound-CI. All thanks to Bastian Greshake Tzovaras (@gedankensteucke) for putting up an issue for writing tests.
The mentors were patient and helped me in resolving the silliest of errors that I encountered, be it writing tests or setting up the local environment. My sincere gratitude to Mike Escalante (@mcescalante) and Steph Smith-Unna (@treblesteph) for their patience.
Altogether it was rewarding to work for this community and I gained new skills and a lot of experience. Currently I am working on integrating Github and Twitter APIs to Open Humans as an Outreachy intern.
I look forward to giving back to this amiable community.
A huge shout out to the Open Humans community! Recently they have introduced personal data notebooks to enable users to analyse their data in their browser. Check this out right now.
