My proposal for GSoC ’16 has been selected and so my journey towards an awesome summer has begun.
When i started contributing to open source i had only the bookish knowledge learned from school and college and only a little bit of practical experience, i had no idea how a real life software was run and maintained, then i found syncplay . It was a software I used daily and got to know after a little while that it was Open Source, by that time i knew what Open Source meant but I hadn’t dove deep into it yet, so i began making some changes to it’s code-base(all hail open-source!).
A week or two later i had learned a lot, i learned about decorators, socket-programming, the twisted framework, utf-8 encoding and also some of the nitty-gritties of coding. I had known about the GSoC Program(one of my friends had participated earlier), and got to know(from the contributors) that syncplay wouldn’t be participating, so i started searching for organisations that’d be looking to participate and stumbled upon coala which is a static-code analyzer(though saying just this is doing it injustice).
the coala-community in one word is awesome! i have never seen a community in my little experience that is so helpful to newcomers! it took a little time getting used to learning how to operate the software at first but once i got used to it, it was and is still an amazing experience. Working beside sils, AbdealiJK, Makman2 and all of the coala community has been an awesome learning/entertaining experience till now and i can’t wait to imagine what it would be like once the summer gets started!.
As far as my Project goes it deals with creating Indentation algorithms that would be language independent. It would automatically correct indentation(thanks to awesome diff management by coala) and would also look for cases when lines get too long and would even break the lines once it gets completed.
Open source has been a really fascinating experience so far. Apart from GSoC i’m looking to contribute to a lot of open source in my spare time i’d like to finish my PR for syncplay, and find some other projects to contribute, i have a few ideas myself, let’s hope they see the light of day ;).
All in all I’ve learned a lot from these few months contributing. I’ve developed habits like watching talks, reading blogs, all of them being so informative! I’ve learnt a lot about programming writing not only code, but writing efficient, well formatted code. I’ve had glimpses of frameworks, learnt new types of software. Being an IT student was never as exciting as it is now.
learningstuffeveryday 