The title is true. And I can prove it.

  Open Source Community Neighbour
1 The community is ever-growing now because of a plethora of awareness drives about OSS. You get to interact first hand with a variety of people on a greater variety of topics! Open source just doesn’t involve coding. It also consists of documentations, designs, tech talks, student-friendly programmes, community events, Hacktober Fest and lots more, all heavily important for this community’s healthy functioning. They’re the same old and probably wish you were gone.
2 Every person’s journey in Open Source starts with a community bonding session, where you talk cheerfully and proudly about yourself and get to know everyone else involved in your favourite project. Probably didn’t even wish you on your birthday.
3 OSS community is now engaging new contributors by organizing month-long programmes and provide handsome stipends. (GSoC)[https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/], (Outreachy)[https://www.outreachy.org/], (SOCIS)[https://socis.esa.int/], (GCI)[https://codein.withgoogle.com/archive/], etc) Neighbour giving you money? Good joke.
4 You get to learn a lot of cool geeky concepts and are perceived as highly intellectual. You get to showoff organization swag and can attend OSS conferences around the world! Probably bores you with the same abroad trip story and pics they took 2 yrs back.

And all these realizations didn’t come to me by just reading about them in blogs. I experienced it all firsthand. My journey hasn’t been a straightforward one.

I had heard about GSoC during my 1st year of university, in a talk given by Saptak Sengupta, a 4th year then, who was a GSoCer in FOSSASIA. Following his talk and reading various blogs online, I decided to apply for GSoC in my 2nd year when with some magic googling, I came across Outreachy. That year, I had applied with Mozilla for both the programs. I contributed to each project for 2 months but unfortunately wasn’t selected. Outreachy happens bi-yearly and so I applied again in December, only to get rejected due to ineligibility issues. By this time I wanted to be a part of an open source programme more than ever. With a lot of motivation from some of my friends, I decided to streamline my efforts and applied for Outreachy for the current round.

And here I am!

I chose Outreachy over GSoC for a couple of reasons:

  1. I can’t be an Outreachy intern if I’ve been a GSoC intern previously(not applicable vice-a-versa).
  2. While both the programmes promote awareness about opensource, Outreachy also hugley promoted diversity. This is something I strongly believe in and have been advocating it during my entire college life.
  3. Its a little easier(can also say faster) to start contributing to an Outreachy project than a GSoc one. The codebase is generally intuitive, the pool of people applying is very focused, and mentors give greater attention to individuals.
  4. And the stipend is a little too cool xD. We also get an additional $500 as trival stipend and I feel its such a brilliant way to engage people to explore and expand their physical boundaries!

How to choose projects:

I can’t stress this enough(and I wish I was told this earlier).

CHOOSE PROJECTS THAT MAKE SENSE TO YOU, AND NOT BECAUSE YOUR FRIENDS ARE DOING THE SAME.

There is a huge amount of love for FOSSASIA in my university for some unknown reason. I too, following suit, attempted to contribute there. I failed miserably mainly because I wasn’t comfortable with the tech stack and the projects just didn’t speak to me. I also tried TEAMMATES-NUS, The Tor Projectand Wikimedia. I’m primarily an Ubuntu user and I love the control a terminal window gives me. I realized that I was more fluent in C++/C and Python than JavaScript, and that’s when I landed upon my project: Extend unit tests for libmodulemd (the project has changed now drastically, more about it here). While it eventually required me to triple boot my machine (Windows + Ubuntu + Fedora), the intuitive code base and my mentor’s constant feedback made me passionate about contributing to Fedora.

I started with solving documentation issues, while other participants had started contributing to the actual codebase. After failing to run the project on a VM (6 TIMES), and triple booting it, I started tackling issues labelled as Good-first-issue. I would claim an issue and start working on it. Whenever I was stuck I would ask for doubts on Github and IRC.

In Outreachy, its more important to be consistent in your work than proficient.

Its one thing to practice Geeks For Geeks, sit for campus placements and get a job. But its completely another and noteworthy if you yourself initiate contributing to OSS. It takes guts. But as someone correctly said,

Everything is difficult before its easy :-)