“ The journey of a thousand miles start with a single step ”
— Lao Tzu

What is Open-Source Contribution?

Open-Source software provides users the freedom to modify their code according to their need. It is a way through which you can get a real developer experience and work on amazing real-time projects. We get solve many real-life problems through the technical solutions by working on such open-source projects.

What is LGM-SOC?

LetsGrowMore is a community of the students, for the students, by the students. LetsGrowMore Summer of Code(LGMSOC) is a 2-month long open source contribution program which was initiated to enhance the student participation in the open source community and the contribution programs under the guidance of mentors from the open-source community.

My 2 months long Journey ……

It was my first open source program , I was quite good at web development and beginner in open source just because of Hacktoberfest2020, when program started on 10 June, 2021. I thought I know GitHub well , but when I started contributing I got to know I didn’t know everything. Open Source contributions really help us with Git and GitHub , which should be handled wisely when you are working on good quality projects. I learnt how a team work and collaborate on a project .All the mentors and project admins helped me a lot for that via live sessions and guidance.

Now coming to contributions, I started with two beginner projects having tech stack for front-end web development . I tried to make first PR to spacex-launch-data where I set all the details for space missions fetched from SPACEX API in a well designed card based UI . after development I faced some git merge conflicts that I solved after few attempts. Finally I made that PR on main repo which got merged for level-3 with appreciation from project admin that I did not expect from 1st PR, so it really boosted my confidence. Along with contributing on this project I found another project Musicophilia very interesting , I was contributing on these two projects and was finding more interesting projects in first week.

After first week of contributions I found a Full / MERN stack project called project-zone , that I was actually looking for. This project helps students to find project ideas based on their interests , students can also save, like and rate their favourite projects and can get badges according to their activity on their profile. I contributed during whole program on this project and am the Top Contributor now with 40+ PR got merged. The project admin - Rohit Kumar Saini really helped me every time when I requested . mentors for this project - Satyam and Kanak were also happy to help every time. I created most of the frontend pages from scratch in ReactJS according to figma design I was being given . Then I moved to backend with MongoDB and NodeJS , A contributor Naveen was working really good with backend, we team up for different functionalities and I learnt a lot from him. I added user like , save, rate, comment, profile update, project add, badge for activity and many more backend functionalities and integrated them with frontend as well.

I was feeling very excited contributing to project-zone everyday that I even did not look for more projects for one and half months. Then for last two weeks I started contributing on LetsGrowMoreCommunity’s own project DSA-Playyard which helps students who want to enhance their journey in software development by enhancing DSA problem solving skills. I was solving some of the Best DSA problems and was contributing them with explanation.

Conclusion

As the journey came to an end I had a total of successful 60+ PR merged in this span of 2 months.

This was the first season of LGMSOC that wrapped up after your consistent efforts and enthusiasm. With more than 4000 participants, 100+ highly skilled mentors, and 60 projects from varied domains to contribute, the first season was a great success. I would like to thank LetsGrowMoreCommunity, all the project admins, mentors and contributors. A great shout out to all of them, they deserve the highest appreciation.

In this journey I learnt a lot from the community. I will continue contributing to such open-source projects even after
LGMSOC( letsgrowmore.in ).

Looking Forward to contribute more in open source.