CSE 123 – Intro to FOSS

It was summer of 2013 when I saw all kinds of Facebook statuses of my seniors stating selection in GSoC along with Quora posts. That’s where I first heard about GSoC and more so it was my first actual look at the working of FOSS. In schools they teach about open source software but that’s just the definitions, nothing about how it actually works. I started looking at how open source works. I started learning about the version control system. In the beginning it all seemed too big to handle. So much so that for a month I just kept looking at organizations to start working. I would read the “Getting Started” guide for each of them and then would find myself stuck when it came to actually starting with work. I just looked at bugs and the descriptions of each – even the beginner ones - looked quite scary. Each time I looked at a bug I thought it’s too difficult for me. But till that time I hadn't gone to the IRC of any organizations (which I realized was my biggest mistake). Finally one day I set up and went online on the IRC of Mozilla. The developers welcomed me and helped me get started off. One of the developers was a mentor for a beginner bug and he asked me if I was interested in working with him. And here I was solving my first bug. That was the moment when I realized what an important tool the IRC was. The bug when I started working and asking my mentor, turned out to be a very minor problem. All these days I had been staring at them from the outside – all of them looking so difficult and literally scary and here I was working my easily through the first bug. I’d recommended anyone whose reading this blog and aspiring to be contribute to open source – “PLEASE JOIN THE IRC”. So in a week I had solved my first bug and it had been merged into the main repository. Delighted I was, seeing the mail congratulating me for solving my first bug. Then suddenly came in my end semester exams and I had to stop all activities except for my academic work. And sadly this continued in the winter holidays too.