LIFE IN TECH
The Debut to RGSoC
RGSoC: Making Open Source More Diverse Since 2013
This is my first ever article on the Medium and here I want to share my experience of Ruby Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) along with Manaswini Das
Rails Girls Summer of Code is a global fellowship program for women and non-binary coders. Students receive a three-month scholarship to work on existing Open Source projects and expand their skill set.
After we made up our mind to participate in RGSoC and contribute to HospitalRun , we were a bit baffled when it came to the code and concepts with seemed obscure at first.
But as said by Walt Disney, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing”.
So we kept struggling with the files and hundreds of lines of code. Finally when we were confident enough to make the first move we reached out to our mentors , who directed us to dive into the “Help Wanted” issues.
The first thing that someone looks in a website is its very appearance. Just as a child sees the visual attributes in any object first , we were also attracted to the front-end issues.This is how we got our very first issue.
The issue that we took up was regarding inconsistent buttons which were not clearly visible. We went through the issue and tried a number of colours to blend with the look and feel of the site. It was a tedious task to come down in favour of some colours out of that plethora. Finally we replaced the button colours with bright ones which suited best and were user-friendly by modifying some CSS .That day we made our first ever Pull Request. But unfortunately or we should say fortunately we could not pass all the test of Travis and we were introduced to the world of software testing. The error was caused by ESLint, which is designed as a tool for identifying and reporting on patterns found in JavaScript code. We explored the rules of ESLint briefly,fixed the generated errors and committed the changes . After two days, to our utter surprise, our mentors reviewed our Pull Request and gave us positive response. After some recommended modifications, it was finally merged. It gave us immense pleasure to contribute to HospitalRun .
Certainly well said by John Dewey, “Failure is instructive. The person should learn quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”
It is almost one month of work now and Trust us! It is the most satisfying feeling !
Thanks to the RGSoC team for giving us this golden opportunity to get started with Open-Source.