My GSOC Journey
What is Google Summer of Code (GSOC)
For all of you who don't know what GSOC is, "Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development". To know more about the selection procedure, eligibility criteria please visit the official site.
My experience
Learning to code
Going back to the time when I joined college, I knew C++ as it was taught in our school and apart from that some bits of HTML, CSS and Javascript. After learning these basics I started searching for resources to upgrade my skills to the next level. So I searched for some resources to upgrade my skills. And I found this. Following the course and some other online material and creating side-projects helped me sharpen my skills. Once I had enough confidence on my skills, I started contributing to some of my college societies as a web developer. So by the end of first year I had added these badges to my skillset😛.
Contributing to open-source
Entering my second year, I also started contributing to some of the open-source projects built using the MERN Stack. I started contributing to the p5.js-web-editor . Contributing to this project helped me boost my confidence of working with large codebases and gave some insights into the development workflow as well. Honestly speaking, it is quite overwhelming at first to get started, when you see such a huge codebase. So my way to prevent this was that I focussed my attention on a small component in the entire codebase. From there I started working on fixing bugs and eventually understanding how different bits and pieces are combined to make the entire software work. Apart from that I also started contributing to the EOS-User-Story project. As the User-story project is relatively younger and it used strapi (a headless cms, something which I was quite curious about), to power its backend, I was interested in the project. (And FYI the the backend powering this blog is strapi, as well😉). I contributed several new features to the project, including profile picture change, and update password.
Getting selected in GSOC
When the GSOC projects were announced I started working on my project proposal for EOS-User-Story project. I discussed the improvements with my mentors and submitted the final proposal. And finally when the results were announced I was one of the 5 people selected. Just in case if you're curious then checkout my project here.
The GSOC Community Bonding period
The GSOC Community Bonding period was superb. I got to know my mentors, and my fellow mentees well. We worked on migrating the project repositories from Gitlab to Github. I worked on configuring Github Actions to run the tests and deploy the website. Here are links to the PRs that I submitted during the community bonding period.
Apart from that I along with my project partner, Harshita Mangla, worked on setting up the project board and prioritising the features.
So what next??
This week I will be working on implementing the search feature for stories along with the Cypress tests for the feature. I'll be updating in my blog post about anything interesting that I find related to Javascript and my project in general. So stay tuned.