About KWoC
Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program for students who are new to open source software development. The program not only helps students to get involved in open source but also prepares them for many open-source summer programs; Google Summer of Code is one of them.
What makes it significant?
- Introduction to Open Source :
KWoC provides a great opportunity to get acquainted with Github along with Git commands and contribute to open source efficiently. Brush up your coding skills. If you love coding and want to learn about software development, then KWoC helps you to get a glimpse of it and gives you a head start.
- Preparation for GSoC :
With KWoC, you get to know about how to select a project, interact with mentors and learn all other things that prepare you in the best way for the next GSoC.
Project Selection
Throughout one month, we were provided with a bunch of projects varying from Web Development, App Development to Machine Learning, Scripting Tools, etc. Being from a Computer Science background, I had a gist of all the languages. Among them that fascinated me the most were Javascript and Python, the former has a huge community while the latter was responsible for some great advancements in human history. So I decided to contribute to projects which included these languages.
As I was going through projects, I stumbled upon projects which I decided to contribute. They were Video Downloader, Notation Converter, Instant Apps, URL Shortener, FeedMyCourseBack and Cartoonist.
Contribution
The project consisted of a website wherein the user could upload the URL of any video and the video would get downloaded as an mp4. Started just like a Youtube video downloader, they were progressing to move forward with Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Videos as well. Since I had worked with python scripts before, I was curious about knowing how the downloading process works behind the scenes. I contributed by making a Twitter script by taking some help from stack overflow which when run individually and given the URL of the Twitter video and the name of the output file on the command line, automatically downloads it. I then tried integrating it with the project but I fell into some non-debuggable errors, which later on mentors said would handle by themselves.
You can check my merged pull request here.
As goes by the name, the project was all about designs using Python. I contributed by making a mandala art design script using the Python Turtle library. In the process, I got to learn about this fantastic library of Turtle for drawing easy to extremely weird patterns whether it be 2D or 3D.
You can check my merged pull request here.
- Instant Apps by Felvin Search -
This project had a bigger picture as they were trying to enhance the way we search through Felvin. Felvin is a search engine similar to Google but we have some different facilities. Go check out them on Twitter as they have some amazing community on it too. I was intrigued by the size of the project and had difficulty setting it up locally so I tried to fix some minor issues they had like formatting some CSS as well as the code.
Here are my merged PR's - 1 & 2.
My contributions in the above projects mainly included improving documentation by writing issue templates, beautifying readme's, and minor UI fixes. I was busy after the mid-evals so I tried to contribute on a slightly lighter side as compared to before mid-evals.
Here are my merged PR's - 1, 2 and 3.
Conclusion
My experience with the KWoC has been positive, as the amount of contribution is appropriate for novices and allows me to test out all areas of Open Source Development. I also learned how to communicate with mentors and other people involved in the process.