Introduction
I'm glad to share that I've been selected for GSoC 2021 under the organization BRL-CAD for the project OGV and my mentor is Dr. Daniel Rossberg. The moment I read the mail about my selection was endless. I was working for this event since I started my graduation in 2019.
Why I choose to participate in GSoC
I'll be honest with this. I always wanted to participate in open source events and when was pursuing mine under graduation diploma. I came to know about GSoC and my first reaction was Yayyy... because we all have dreamt about working with big companies like Google. Though it is very different from that still sounds fascinating to me.
When I tried to participate in open source contribution. I fixed an issue in a project and sent PR. That was my biggest mistake... I mean not about sending PR it is about not discussing stuff before doing it. Yep, you read it right. I didn't talk about the bug and the solution with anyone. I was being mean and afraid about what if I'll open an issue on this repository and someone fix this before me. BUT it went well my PR got merged and I got fame in that project. HELL NO!!! the next minute I opened PR my PR was closed by the project manager as the bug I was trying to fix was a feature. I learned it the hard way though but that's important, we have to discuss stuff before we start contributing to open source or even in any project. Conversation plays an important part.
But even after that I still wanted to learn though it took a little bit of time for me to move on from that thing :p I almost dropped the idea to contribute in open source. Then I realize there is no sense going back now. I started learning stuff and started preparing myself so that I can work on real projects that will be on GSoC.
Well, I almost forgot we are talking about why I choose GSoC. I don't know why talk too much. Anyway, it was awesome to see your name on Google's event. You get to know more about open source and meet new people (which is my favorite part). Also, at that moment I was feeling when I'll go out wearing out Google's Tee I'll be a celebrity :p Kind of childish thought but it motivated me at that time. If I talk about stipend till the end of 2020 I didn't know Google also gives you a stipend. So, these were the reasons why I choose to participate in GSoC.
Community Bonding Period
I the community bonding period I learned Meteor.js because that was the requirement of a project I need to work on. I took myself a code walk-through that helped a lot in understanding the flow of an application. I talked with my mentor about merging the existing PR's to the project because there was no active project manager before I started. My mentor suggested upgrading the Meteor version to the latest then we will move ahead. The project was using Meteor version 1.8.1 and we had to upgrade the project to 2.2 there was 14 Meteor global release between these two versions. When I searched about upgrading the version I end up having thought in my mind I have to upgrade this one by one and it will take a lot of time. Then my mentor guided me to upgrade the whole application once and he provided me instructions to upgrade. We can see how important and beneficial the conversation part is.
I learned a lot in the community bonding period itself. The first lesson was conversation, the more you talk about things the more it will be clear but keep in mind it could be pretty annoying sometimes talking about every single thing. Another thing I learned was we should be confident about work. I never worked with a meteor project before though I was working with Vue and React with node.js for a while now but I was kind of afraid to use meteor.
I'll wind up saying, I enjoyed the learning part of Meteor for the project. Now the real excitement was working on the project.
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