GirlScript Summer of Code 2018
Ever wondered to be a part of the open source community? Well, I always wasn’t all up for it… however, things started to change once I took part in it. Now, if you haven’t heard of ‘open-source’ before, fear not, I was in your shoe a few months earlier!
Back in February 2018, I took part in the Google India Challenge Scholarship and that is when I got my first taste of open-source community. I successfully cleared ‘phase one’ of the program and have received the full scholarship to Udacity’s Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree. If interested, you can check more on this in my previous article! Many scholars used to share resources on daily basis for beginners (like me) to get exposure in various opportunities! Well, one day someone posted something about GirlScript Summer of Code and I took the time to fill in the registration form. Never had I anticipated that these simple chain of events would change my point-of-view about coding, community, and collaboration! I would like to call it 3C of Openness (I know, I’m not great at naming stuff 😣 )and now fast forward to 31st May, I received an email from GirlScript India confirming my participation. From that day onward things started to unfold in a rather elegant way!
A 3-month long open source initiative
GirlScript Summer of Code 2018 is India’s first women-oriented technical festival with an aim to promote gender equality as well as helping people who are just starting out in the field of technology! In total, 20 open source project proposals were accepted which you can check here. Now, an individual could’ve taken part in either as a participant or mentor but being a participant, we can contribute to any number of projects on varying range of topics viz. AI Assistant to Competitive Coding!
The 2 most widely used programming languages in all of the projects combined are:
- Python
- JavaScript
I know what you’re thinking — for being a participant in the summer of code I must’ve been a 10x programmer! But please let me tell you I’m not! I do develop some static websites, but I don’t consider myself as anywhere near a decent programmer. Wanna hear the cool part?… I participated in this program without even writing a single line of code and still earned the position of the top contributor in one project named First Timers Guide!
Being an open source contributor
You see open source contribution isn’t about being ace at coding, it’s about being compassionate and requires a bit of empathy for other fellow contributors!
Let me tell you how I came up with 3C of Openness — I always had this innate passion for software development and computer science in general, but after a while, one can lose interest and this is coming from personal experience. However, the best way to overcome this condition is to do pair programming and I did just that! I enrolled in the Google India Challenge Scholarship along with one of my friend and we built a sort of community for members of our state; we often would help each other with certain concepts and used to collaborate on a couple of projects!
Being an introvert while also having an imposter syndrome on top of that has been quite challenging. Soon, I came to a conclusion that we can’t learn one C (coding) well enough without considering the other two (community & collaboration)! This led me to develop my own principle aka 3C of Openness!
Before this epiphany, I would try so hard to learn stuff all by myself but we can accomplish that in a much easier way if we collaborate. In fact, it’s okay to not know everything but still being able to provide something to the community, even as simple as writing articles on various computer science related topics in markdown format and making a pull request; which is what I’ve been doing for the past two months in GirlScript Summer of Code 2018!
Epilogue
If you’re just starting out in the field of technology consider making a leap of faith towards contributing in open source! You may think that contributing to all the open source projects require a huge amount of knowledge and expertise; well, indeed it is true but not for all. There are many beginner-friendly repositories on GitHub that you may consider looking for!
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” — Lao Tzu
GSSoC 2018 has been an awesome opportunity for me to grow as a developer since the mentors were really helpful and cooperative! We also had an awesome slack workspace where contributors would often post about various external opportunities. I’m really looking forward to contributing for GirlScript Foundation, a non-profit organization registered by the Government of India which made GSSoC possible in the first place!
For more info, visit:
https://gssoc.tech/
https://girlscript.tech/
https://github.com/GirlScriptSummerOfCode
As of now, I’m pursuing Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree at Udacity and also trying to stop the over usage of the exclamation mark ‘!’ in my articles 😄! Sorry!… um, anyway, feel free to connect with me at LinkedIn or follow me on GitHub, and maybe we can execute 3C of Openness together and come up with the next big thing!
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