GSSoC- A beautiful start to my journey in the world of Open Source

During the month of February of 2019, I got to know about GirlScript Summer of Code. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, GSSoC is a three month long Open Source program during summers conducted by GirlScript Foundation, started in 2018, with an aim to help beginners get started with Open Source Development while encouraging diversity.

At the start of March, I had a lot on my schedule already and I was very skeptical about whether or not I would be able to contribute to it even though I was enthusiastic about it. Thankfully, I found the wonderful repository Algo-ds-notes by Aman Jain. It was the time when I was looking to study Data Structures and Algorithms extensively and Algo-ds-notes provided me the perfect opportunity to learn as well as contribute to GSSoC and thus began my journey in the world of open source.

During the course of three months, I didn’t even realize, but I found myself finding out the time somewhere between other tasks to contribute algorithms to GSSoC. In retrospect, I feel those are the time I might have completely wasted doing something irrelevant. GSSoC gave me a sense of purpose for a period of three months. I can’t thank all the mentors of Algo-ds-notes enough namely Aman Jain, Rishabh Garg, Manbir Singh Marwah and several others who were also working as hard as the participants to make GSSoC a good learning experience. They were there day-in and day-out resolving any issue that came forward.

However, my biggest thanks is reserved to my fellow contributors in GSSoC. It is only because of their such active participation throughout the three months, that even I pushed myself to do more. It is only because of them that I have more than 60 Pull requests merged in such a short span. The healthy competition helped me learn so many algorithms that I was completely unaware of.

However, my biggest learning through GSSoC are not just the algorithms I learnt. I had several interesting life lessons as well.
1) You never know how much you can handle. Never doubt your own capabilities. During the course of GSSoC, I got overburdened with tasks. I had to travel a lot, work a lot, attend family functions, but somehow I was able to successfully handle almost of the things which at some point seemed impossible.

2) It is never too late to start a new journey. So don’t hesitate to set foot in a new domain. I was in my final year when I got to know about GSSoC. I didn’t have any experience in the field of open source as well. Most of my fellow contributors were my juniors, but I was determined to begin contributing to open source and I have to say, GSSoC turned out to be a phenomenal learning experience for me.

3) When you do it alone, you might lose motivation along the way. When you do it with friends, you won’t even realize how much you have achieved. Your friends and your fellow contributors prove to be the biggest catalysts and support systems.

I am extremely happy to have been a part of GirlScript Summer of Code. I would definitely recommend this program to my juniors as GSSoC is an amalgamation of a good learning experience, a perfect first step to open source and expose you to an active community of like-minded people.