KWoC - Project Report
By, Saurabh Shubham | GitHub username: saurabh3333
About the program:
Kharagpur Winter of Code(KOWC) is a 5-week long online programme for the students, who are new to open source software development organised by Kharagpur open Source Society(KOSS), IIT Kharagpur.
Projects I have worked on:
1. relative-date-reverse | Project link: relative-date-reverse
2. cli-cube-timer | Project link: cli-cube-timer
Mentor’s details:
Name: Siddharth Kannan
GitHub username: icyflame
Choosing the project:
Choosing the project was a very easy task for me. There were many projects available characterized on the basic of of its type and language used. Since I like dealing with web technologies I end up bookmarking 3 projects which was mainly written using JavaScript. I read the documentation provided with the projects and at the end I have picked relative-date-reverse and cli-cube-timer because I was very excited to know how node-modules work.
About the projects:
- Relaive-date-reverse:
This is a npm module used to convert commonly used relative date strings likeyesterdayandtomorrowto Date objects. It is written in JavaScript and can used be used after installing it using npm. - Cli-cube-timer:
This is a npm module used for recording and monitoring rubiks cube solve time. It uses GitHub Gist to store the solve. It is written in JavaScript and can used be used after installing it using npm.
Work/Challenges:
It was early December when I started. First of all I have watched some videos related to node.js, regular expressions, and some advance topics of Git like branching and forking.
After this I have mailed Siddharth sir. He replied immediately to my queries.
After gaining some confidence I started with relative-date-reverse. Initially I realised that some of the features were not correctly working and reported my first issue on 2nd Dec 2017.
At that time there were 2 other issues which were pending.
I started working on all the issues simultaneously and opened my first PR on 4th December 2017. This PR was totally disaster as I have written a very unorganised code. My patch was unable to pass the Travis-CI automated tests. Siddharth sir helped me on this and I opened a new PR on 7th December 2017 solving both issues.
After 31 comments and 9 commits my PR got accepted and merged. 😁😁
After my PR got accepted I checked the statistics page of KWoC. But the statistics page was not showing my contribution. I mailed the same to KWoC.
I have also informed Siddharth sir on the same.
Since there was no issues left to solve in relative-date-reverse I started learning about the next project cli-cube-timer luckily which was also mentored by Siddharth sir.
This project was relatively more challenging for me. I mailed my mentor many times and finally started to understand the flow of the project. In this project there were many issues and I started with the issue46 which was to add shortcut during solving.
I opened a pull request on 29th Dec 2017. After 10 comments and 3 commits my PR got accepted.
After this I worked on issue48 and submitted the patch.
Major takeaways:
Technically I have learned many things like working of npm modules, regular expressions, code organisation, code optimization.
But the biggest takeaway for me are things I have learned about open source world and community. I have learned the importance of patience and clarity during coding.
Verdict:
Huge thanks to my mentor Siddharth kannan sir for his support and patience. He has made the entire KWoC journey very smooth and was always there to clear my doubts. Also thanks to entire KWoC team for organising such a wonderful program and making my entire winter very productive.
Thank You.
