Outreachy'20 - My journey with Publiclab!

09 May 2020 | opensource outreachy publiclab summer-of-code

Hi! I’m Sneha and I will be sharing with you my journey on being accepted in the Outreachy programme with Public Lab. My guess is if you are here you have already taken your first step towards Opensource or are excited about the same. So let’s dive straight into it!

How I started with Opensource

My journey with opensource began mostly due to a month long-event held in my college called Opencode IIITA (If you are a newbie to Opensource make sure to check it out in Jan’20). This was followed by building small projects and adding them to my Github. I also made it a point to attend as many Hackathons I can.

I also mentored as a GCI mentor for AnitaB.org and contributed to a couple of other Opensource organizations like FOSSASIA, Zulip, AnitaB.org.

What is Outreachy?

Outreachy provides internships to work in open source and free software for under-represented communities. Outreachy internships are open to applicants around the world. Interns work remotely, and are not required to move. Interns are paid a stipend of $5,500 USD for the three month internship. Interns have a $500 USD travel stipend to attend conferences or events.

I came to know about Outreachy from one of my friends. I checked out the website and the program was really intriguing to me! I really wanted to be a part of this and started hustling right away!

Choosing the organization

But how do I start? Sure, I had contributed to Opensource before but what if I lack the skills or fail at even setting up the project or what if my contributions turn out to be insignificant.

Battling all these questions, I started searching for organizations to contribute to within my skillset.

This is where Publiclab came into picture. It was an organization that made it possible for newbies to contribute to Opensource easily.

This was achieved by having many first-timers-only (issues which are easy and made for contributors who haven’t already contributed to their codebase) and keeping the software extremely modular (broken down into many components making it easier to work on any isssue without having knowledge of the entire codebase). But most importantly!!! The community was absolutely amazing :heart: They constantly supported us throughout the journey and spread positive messages on our every small code change getting merged :tada: Even when we got stuck, they pointed us at the right direction.

We also had Weekly Check-ins which actually helped me a lot during these difficult times to take in all that was going on. Having real people share their stories brought us together as a community!

What is Public Lab ?

Publiclab is an organization that spreads knowledge and addresses the current environmental issues through this massive userbase who together bring change and promote sustainability. P.S if you want to know more about it please check this out!

My journey

Initially I stuck to solving simple UI fixes and then moved to finding bugs within the website. This involved testing the website and all possible routes to find out if anywhere the website was not showing expected behaviour. Towards the end of the contribution period, I had moved to a couple of bugs in the backend and solving them.

But what I would really like to highlight here is that your contributions towards your code aren’t all that important. The true spirit of Opensource calls for you to help others in their journey with Opensource too! Be it reviewing others pull requests or opening first-timer-issues for other new contributors or even answering their queries in the chat.

Result Day

Due to the heavy traffic the site was down for sometime, and with every minute I could feel me sweating really bad. But at that moment I had one realisation that the months that I spent working on the project was worth it because of all the knowledge that I gained over the time and all the amazing people I got to know of!

The moment came and I got in!! I was ecstatic and all the more excited for my project.

Thanks!!