What is KWoC ?
KWOC — Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program organized by KOSS for the students of various colleges, especially for students of IIT Kharagpur, who are new to open source software development.
The term open source refers to something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible. Open source projects, products, or initiatives embrace and celebrate principles of open exchange, collaborative participation, rapid prototyping, transparency, meritocracy, and community-oriented development.
About Me
Myself Pritish Samal, a sophomore from NIT Rourkela. Being a keen learner, I am always very enthusiastic about any project that I work on and I always deliver my best performance. As the skills required for this project and the skills I’ve acquired through my experience coincide to a great extent, you can be sure that project development will take place at the highest pace. I have always been a dependable member in all the teams I had worked with and I always tend to follow an organized and efficient approach to problem-solving. I would always stay focused on this project as it’s directly related to the lifetime passion I have in frontend development. Lastly, but most importantly, I seldom lose my determination and positivity, which helps me keep going against all odds.
Projects Selection
In KWoC, you’ll get a hell lot of projects ranging from beginner level to advanced level implementations of various tech stacks. Since I was new to Javascript and React, I chose projects accordingly. Not exactly projects, I searched for issues to which I can contribute.
I chose this project because it was beginner-friendly and used vanilla javascript. At first, I forked this project and cloned it to my local system. It had issues that were the base of their project. Initially, It had a single html file with some boilerplate code. I added the HTML script which would provide the users to enter their CGPA.
Then I added the functionality which would convert the entered CGPA to GPA and display it on the new page. Also, refactored the code by separating the javascript from the HTML file. I’ve attached the linked PR that was merged.
2. Bot-Academia/Nebula-Backend :
Nebula is a project that aims to provide universities and communities with a platform that can be utilized to make the working of various clubs in a systematic manner. A pull request template is a file containing markdown text that is added to your pull request description when the pull request is created.
I contributed to its backend project by adding a pull request template because they help provide a baseline standard of informational quality and organizational rigor. The merged PR is linked below.
SpeakEd is an Open Community Platform connecting Speakers to Community Leads while building their Portfolios. Initially, this project was empty except for a readme file. This project has taught me a thing or two. It uses React for its frontend and Django for its backend. In the first PR that I made to this repo, I added a `create-react-app` template and also a Pull Request template and Issue template altogether in a single pull request, and that too from the development branch of my fork. Below, I’ve attached this PR which was not merged.
The project admin reviewed my PR and suggested me to make some changes. The first thing he mentioned was that we should always have a single logical change through each PR and the other was to work on a temporary branch and send a PR from that branch. This is the actual workflow that I was unaware of. So, I made the required changes and sent my final PR.
Conclusion
My experience with Kharagpur Winter of Code has been quite good, as the level of contribution is quite apt, considering for the beginners, and testing out all the aspects of Open Source Development. I got to learn many new things and also, I got a grip on git and GitHub. I had some other projects in mind to which I could’ve contributed but due to some unavoidable situations, I was unable to continue towards the end. I’m mentioning below those projects which were also great and beginner friendly.
Report By: Pritish Samal (GitHub handle: CIPHERTron)