My baby step towards the Open Source Culture
I wanted to kickstart my OpenSource Journey, learn new skills, and work on big projects. But I didn’t know how to start.
I had wasted the first semester of my college doing unproductive things. But I was lucky enough to realize my mistake at an early stage and around January I had started learning frontend and that was when there was an introductory program of GirlScript chapter in my college. From there I got to know about GirlScript and about GirlScript Summer of Code.
Initially, I had doubt’s about joining the program. But then one of my senior’s encouraged me to join the program. And I am really happy that I took his advice seriously and joined the program.
Story of my First PR
My first PR was the most difficult one. I don’t even know why I had even registered for gssoc as I didn’t know much tech stacks and to be honest I didn’t even know what was Git and GitHub.
In the initial days, I had struggled a lot to find an issue as I didn’t know much tech stacks. And I was also not active in the initial days as I was busy with my college exams and I was finding it difficult to find a project. It was during that time the frontend part of the project CROP AI had just started and the mentor of that project, Rajat Sharma had created so many beginner’s friendly issues. And with his help, I made my first PR.
And after that, my contribution journey began and made several PR’s in various projects after this.
My three-month journey in brief
My journey with GSSoC’20 started in February with a mail confirming my participation as a contributor to my very first open-source contribution.
Till 29th February all the contributors were told to interact with the mentors and other contributors over the slack channel. We also started going through various kinds of projects announced in GSSoC. After going through the projects we choose the projects which matched our tech stacks and after 1st march, we started contributing towards those projects.
In these three month’s long journey I got a lot to learn from my mentors. I made a hell lot of mistakes while submitting my PR’s. But my mentors were really helpful and they helped me to understand the workflow and submit successful PR’s. They also helped me to improve my code quality which I used to neglect in my personal projects. I also got the learn many new tech stacks while doing the project.
These three months have changed me from an open-source newbie to a coder who is now a lot more comfortable using GitHub than before.
My Last PR
When I made my first PR I didn’t know that my last PR would be the most exciting one in the whole journey of GSSoC’20.
In the last few days before the program was going to end, I approached the mentor of COSMOS as I wanted to write an article at OpenGenus. And my mentor Aditya Chatterjee assigned me a topic of my choice. I guess I had approached him 4–5 days before the program was going to end. And when I wrote the article first it wasn’t quite satisfactory and he had asked me to make some changes. Finally, my article got approved and I was able to make the PR exactly 10 minutes before the program ended. Even at the last moment, my mentor reached out to help me out and it was a really memorable experience. He had helped me as well as other contributors to make a successful PR before the program ended.
You can read my article here.
The Final Note
It was an enriching experience and I would like to thank the GirlScript Summer of Code and the GirlScript Foundation for providing this wonderful opportunity for beginners like me.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my mentors for helping and guiding me throughout these three months. I really got a lot to learn from this program.
These three months not only provided me the opportunity to taste open-source but also gave me an opportunity to make a good number of amazing connections.
Looking forward to many more of such experiences!!!
About the Author
Currently, I am pursuing BTech in Electronics and Instrumentation from the College of Engineering Trivandrum.
I am a newbie in the field of web development and I love to do competitive programming. I have worked on open source projects as a part of GSSoC’20 by GirlScript Foundation. In my free time, I write answers on Quora and blogs on Medium.
If you want to get connected with me, please follow the links
Github-https://github.com/Sapna2001
LinkedIn-https://www.linkedin.com/in/sapna2001/
If you have any suggestions, feel free to get in touch with me over LinkedIn & the comment section is also all yours.
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Thanks for reading!!!!
