Filled with </> and ❤

Hello there, guys! First off all, have a happy time with your vacation.
Enjoy your vacation as much as you can. Because, now’s the time to get lazy.
And if you’re one of my fellow NITians, this is the time to make the most out
of home food (you know the reason why ;)).

Alright, let’s not keep you waiting any longer. Okay, here’s the big news.
My proposal for Google Summer of Code 2017 with coala has been
accepted 🍻. And this is gonna be a long post.

So brace yourselves. It’s quite an exciting opportunity to work with my mentor, Lasse Schuirmann(TYSM, dear Lasse, I’ll try not to be much of a burden to you 😜). Thanks to the community, I’ve learn a lot of things like using docker, prowess of decorators in python, class based viewsets for drf, etc.

So, what am I working on actually?
GitMate is a code review bot that helps manage code on GitHub. It was primarily written in flask and the techniques employed couldn’t use a proper plugin architecture, and it was merely a prototype. It was henceforth used on all coala repositories hosted on GitHub. We knew something radical needed to be done to bring about the change. So, the second one was opensourced and built upon django and drf.

This time, the architecture is being developed on a plugin basis. Users have the full fledged availability for code use. The benefits of this architecture were crucial. Plugins could be hotswapped (add/remove on the go). Each one is independent of the other (sandboxing). There are several other reasons, but those were the crucial ones. The entire architecture underwent
rapid development because of opensource. This time around, we are not just
giving access to GitHub users. It’s gonna be GitLab and BitBucket too.
(Yay.. Bots for all.)

Further info on summerofcode.withgoogle.com.

And, how did I get here?
I’mma share my experiences so far, and probably give you some tips too
on how to get here… Hope it’s gonna be a li’l helpful to newcomers in
opensource.

- Share your work on GitHub or GitLab or whatever hosting provider you like.

- Get in touch with an organization. (In my case, I had a beautiful community around my college, started by a few guys who rocked GSoC 2k16, hopefully, we’re gonna continue the legacy…) It all begins there. I was completely blown away when Lasse announced that gitmate started opensourcing for v2.0. (being good at django, I picked up the pace easily) :screenshot of lasse asking for interested people to work on gitmate:

- Start contributing early. Because that’s the only way to get in touch with
the mentors. (We all write bad code, trust me, my first commit to coala wasn’t accepted for 29 days)

- A good proposal is very important. My earlier blog post related to proposal.

- Show what you’re capable of. This enhances your skills and gets you closer to whatever you aimed for. I’ve had about 25 commits accepted by the time of my proposal and nearly 70 commits by the time of acceptance. I don’t mean to say that you need to be the same, but that helps in building self confidence and assurance.

Wrapping it up!

By the way, fellow NITDgpians, get started with opensource as soon as possible. Summer is the best time to learn stuff. Get started with git and build something cool. NITDgpOS welcomes you.

See you soon, guys..!