A Road Ahead!

Hello, people. So this is probably my first blog ever! And, I will be writing here about all the cool stuff on which I’m working on.

A Road Ahead

So the name itself justifies I’m going on a road, a journey. Any Guesses? Well, My journey has already begun in the last week of January 2017. And it’s about joining an open-source community. So, it has been 3 weeks for me and in this blog I will be explaining about how anyone can start contributing to an open-source environment. By giving a gist of my experience I hope you will also make your mind in taking your first step towards the open-source world. But first we need some prerequisites.

What’s an open-source anyway ?

In a simple way, open-source Applications/Softwares are free softwares for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. So, anyone can use open-source software for free, for forever…

Why should I do open-source contribution ?

According to me to learn any specific language suppose C Language. The best way to dive into something is to do a project on it. That’s why I suggest you to join open-source.

Now, talkin about my experience when my first ever patch got merged into main code-base. The, feeling which I got was immensely great. It wasn’t about “my patch got accepted yay!” But the feeling was more about ,”Now my patch will help million’s of world wide user’s. They will be using my work in their daily life”. And at the end it will be worth while your time. I can surely asure you that.

Which open-source project should I choose? How can I get started ?

This question is trivial. I really think that one should always follow his instincts. So, go ahead choose what interests you the most. There are many great projects but I would personally recommend you to start working on small projects then go towards big sheeps.

Do I need any prerequisites ?

That depend’s on how you want to work on the project. You can either hack the core of the language first or directly go on with the flow. The second option is mostly choosed over the first. Even I’m learning with the flow!!, but contributing towards open-source projects requires hell lot of a patience. Which I think once you get started, you will get a hang of it!

So, those are the most basic questions which I find people asking around. And now I will be sharing with you, which open-source project I have choosen and why.

This all started when I came across python in the 1st week of january 2017. And I found it very interesting towards it’s simplicity, working with lists, so many ready-mate packages, NumPy which made N-dimentional array object’s a child’s play and so-on. So, I decided to choose this language, and wanted to do a project on it. Literally I knew nothing about which project I’m gonna choose? So out of the blue box while surfing on the internet, I came across this wonderful project called coala, which basically does static code-analysis. This project in itself is very awesome. I would like to tell you more about it! But you have to wait till next week.

That’s it folks! Hope you like my first blog.

Written on February 27th, 2017 by Saurav Singh