My Journey in GSSOC’21 —

“ The journey of a thousand miles start with a single step ”

— Lao Tzu

What is Open-Source Contribution?

Open-Source software provides users the freedom to modify their code according to their need. It is a way through which you can get a real developer experience and work on amazing real-time projects. We get solve many real-life problems through the technical solutions by working on such open-source projects.

What is Girlscript Summer of Code?

Girlscript Summer of Code is a 3-month long open-source program which is organized by the Girlscript Foundation . It helps the beginners to get acquainted with what exactly open-source development is . It provides an opportunity to the participants to contribute on 100+ projects based on their skills and tech-stack .

My 3 months long Journey ……

Its a long journey but it all started with a very basic issue to add some basic form validation for checking whether email is in correct format or not and it was a very easy issue but it took a lot of time because it was my first time to make a Pull Request .I didn't know anything about git and GitHub that’s why making my first PR was more difficult task then solving that issue, so I referred some You Tube tutorials and learned about git and GitHub . It took me around 4 hours to make that first PR.

When I created my first Pull request I wasn’t sure whether it would be merged or not but when it got merged it boosted my confidence. Then I did the same thing which every beginner would have done. I created that same issue in few other projects also and trust me guys , there is no shame in doing this because in starting main motive is to learn the basic fundamentals about git, GitHub ,issue, PR, updating your branch , exploring issues made by others and try if I could solve it or not . If I thought I could solve a particular issue , I created that issue in some other project in which it was needed .

I never got stuck with one project , I always tired exploring other projects with different tech stacks . I checked all the projects related to python , Flask , Django , PHP , HTML , CSS , Java Script etc. mostly all the projects related to web-development . After Exploring all the projects I selected some 8–10 projects which were good for me and fitted my tech-stack. After that I just create some basic issues in 3–4 project and wait for their assignment and as soon I got assigned in that project I started working on that issue and simultaneously explored other projects as well.

After 1 month I had some 7–8 projects left in which I was working regularly , day and night. Working on these projects was so exciting that I couldn’t keep myself away from this. I never expected that I could achieve rank 1 . It just happened by chance I never worked for rank 1 , I just want to make PRs as much but fun fact is that I got an addiction of open source .

At the end of 2nd month ,there was a time when I was working more than 10 hours a day , no classes , no study, nothing just one thing- open source contribution , but then I realized that its not good to have a addiction like that. Yes, its a good thing to contribute in open source projects but there are other things also as a student like semester exams , study , Coding Practice , etc.

In third month almost all the beginners level issues were completed and that was the time when it was very hard to find issues to work on. I tried my best and started learning so that may be I could solve any issue but then luckily I got a very good project it was purely front-end project and needed some backend Developer .That was my golden chance , I migrated that project to Django and worked on it a lot , all the back-end part was written by me , because that was the last month every developer is working on some particular projects .I learnt a lot about backend in last one month . In that last one month I worked more than I worked in the initial months . Some of the amazing projects that I contributed were : Pixelvibe, Kidney-exchange, Elektra, LesKollab, Flask-Generate-Certificate, Bunk-mailer, EduHelp ,etc..

Conclusion

As the journey came to an end I stood at 1st rank out of a total of 1305 active participants. I had a total of 335 successful PR merged in this span of 3 months.

In this journey I learnt a lot of skills and I would try my best to implement it in my future projects.

I will continue contributing to such open-source projects even after GSSoC. In Fact I am already working as mentor in Lets Grow More Program . Looking Forward to do more towards open source.