The Background
I am a computer science undergraduate at SMVDU. I am currently in my 3rd year but I had not started coding until the summer vacation of my 2nd year.
During these three months of summer, I managed to learn the fundamentals of following skills:
I had also started working on a Django based project socrates. But because of the late start, I didn’t have much exposer in computer science field and was not quite sure about what to do next.
PyCon India’17
At the beginning of my third year, I went to attend PyCon India. That was really a great start to my career in computer science engineering. I learned a lot of things there, I got to know more about Open Source, GitHub, Git and many more new technologies. I attended all the talks I could attend and also a coala dev-sprint which went really great, and that is where I first heard about this awesome organization which provides easy linting and fixing of our badly written codes, in all the languages.
The Decision
PyCon was really a great motivation for me, but still, because of the late start, I needed to choose a path and stick to it until I get the success. I didn’t have a clue which path would be the best for me or I can say I didn’t even know how many paths do I have to choose from. But the good thing was I have some awesome seniors at my uni who always talk about contributing to Open Source and preparing for Google Summer of Code. In fact, some of them has already done their projects with GSoC and some of them are even mentors now. So, the one and only path I can think of at my stage is contributing to Open Source and preparing for GSoC.
I started browsing through GSoC website, read all the blogs to get to know more about it, and then I choose some organizations to contribute to based on my skills. I started with getting started tutorials of the shortlisted organizations but I was still a newbie, so, I was having lots of problems with the starting phase.
Thanks to awesome newcomer docs at coala for helping, in setting up the work environment with almost no problems and learning more about the work process of the organization.
As I had started working with coala, I got myself assigned to my first newcomer issue with their awesome bot corobo, which was an easy fix and I managed to solve it within 5 to 10 minutes which got approved and merged at the master branch in a day.
It was an awesome feeling to live with when I placed my first contribution to Open Source. But I had to get going with the same pace if I have to get more out of working on Open Source projects.
So, with the constant and continuous working of five months and with the help of my great mentor John and other fellow reviewers on my PRs. I managed to become the second most active contributor to one of the coala’s new repository which is a community website based on static Django.
The Proposal
My learning and contributions curve with coala was growing exponentially and in the meantime, GSoC had also announced the list of selected organizations in which coala was one of them, we were pretty sure that coala will be shortlisted but you can never predict Google results.
As I was browsing through coala’s projects list, I asked John that if we have a project based on our community repo and he suggested Newcomer metrics and Gamification project, I did my initial research on the project and found it very interesting, the work was to implement a gamification system for newcomer to developer process at coala.
So, I did some more research for a month and discussions with John and managed to submit a proposal before Students applications deadline.
The Result
Waiting is the hardest thing to do in life, and when you wait for the one and only result which could take you and your career on a better path it becomes harder.
I did no work in the last week of result announcements, I just eat and sleep. No nothing.
And when that day finally comes I didn’t even eat and sleep.
I am really happy to state that I have been selected to work with coala for GSoC 2018.
Whats Next
I am looking forward to have a great summer working with coala and my project mentor’s John, Pranav, Andrew and Gopala.
I will also write a blog post on weekly basis with the updates on my work expreience and progress. That’s all folks, stay tuned. Thank You for reading!:)