I started contributing to OpenSource from October 2021 with Hacktoberfest. Contributions back then were only focused on setting up the project, solving good-first-issues, resolving minor bugs by creating issues, interacting with maintainers of the projects ultimately understanding how the OpenSource ecosystem works. If someone now asks me about OpenSource projects where you actually made some contributions that have changed the project landscape I mark my beginning with IHR.
I came to know about Google Summer of Code from Muskan Khedia from a talk organized by Webwiz a technical club from my university National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. I was glad rather I would say honored to host the workshop, I started asking the generic question which every newbie has, starting out why contribute to OpenSource? Post the event I got in touch with Muskan Di and the thread of my stupid questions began. Muskan Di was kind enough to answer everything.
Once, I came to learn about the program and was motivated to contribute, I started contributing to OpenSource. I started out with Fission, wherein I added PWA with Offline support. In the process, I contributed to more than 15 organisations. I tried contributing to Bench Routes an organisation started by Muskan Di and her friend, which was also an organisation selected in Google Summer of Code 2021.
Selecting the organisation for GSoC is one of the most critical parts. When I started selecting an organisation I had 3 ways in mind to go for it. Firstly, select an organisation that works on the same tech stacks which you already know. Secondly, select an organisation where you love what they are building and believe in it and learn the technologies accordingly. Thirdly, select an organisation where in the maintainers are friendly and help you get started. For me, IHR was a start with 2 and then became a mix of all.
In my sophomore year, I was fascinated by cybersecurity. I started learning about Operating Systems, Database Management, Cyber security tools, and Computer Networks. Of all the three I was most intrigued by Computer Networks. When organisations were released in April of 2022, I came to know about IHR and started understanding its landscape. Every GSoC organisation gets to put some tags on, IHR had put networks as a tag and I knew, this was something I was most interested to work on.
Once, I had selected IHR as the organisation to which I had planned to contribute, I started understanding the codebase. I directly navigated their repositories and started understanding each and every line of code they had written. The excitement went down in a day or so when I was not able to understand the jargons which were used in the code. On the very same day, I understood Computer Networks are not the same as what we get to read in Engineering Books. I was unaware of the keywords which they were building on.
For around 4-5 days, I didn’t touch the codebase and rather started learning the Computer Networks all again. After understanding the terms like ASN, BGP, Network Delays, RTTs, RIPE, and related. In the process Aabhas Sao and Sumana Basu helped me breakdown the topics and getting used to the codebase. Post understanding, I managed to merge 10 Pull Requests, helped contributors get onboard, created and managed issues along with corresponding Pull Requests. Not only, this helped me understand the codebase but also helped me become the orgs GitHub member. Yes, I was GitHub member before the start of the event, which I consider to be one of the biggest achievement in my OpenSource journey! The list of Pull Requests which got merged Pre-GSoC: