My first steps into open source
I have been a huge fan of open source softwares for the last two and half years. I have been using Linux during this whole time and have been trying to explore more and more open source softwares available in the market. That means that now to do any task, however complex, I try to find an open source alternative to any existing easily available software like Adobe Photoshop. I know using Photoshop but GIMP is even better.
Contributing to open source softwares is even more fun than using them. When you see your code pushed to master and being used by thousands and sometimes millions of users, you feel accomplished. Its been over a month that I have started contributing to open source organisation including Mozilla and GNOME. I have also applied for a GSoC 2014 project under GNOME that proposes to extend the gnome-photos functionality by incorporating the support for DLNA Media Servers in gnome-photos. The other contribution of mine being in Mozilla was also a wonderful experience. I learnt alot during the whole process of writing the patch for Mozilla. The patch exposes the raw data functionality to UDP Socket Messages interfaces. It was listed as a good-first-bug but I think the patch complexity was good enough to not to list it as a good-first-bug.
Apart from that, I also started working on a standalone from scratch desktop client for bugzilla viz. bzdesk in C using GTK+. I will start working on it in my free time since the project requires much of my time.
Working for above mentioned organisation was a wonderful experience. Both Mozilla and GNOME are having excellent infrastructure, documentation and community for newbie developers. #gnome-love channel on irc.gnome.org is very helpful. They embrace the new developers trying to solve bugs for GNOME. Similar is the case with Mozilla Community. The Mozilla Community is huge, you will find variety of people working on various things. The architecture of Mozilla is also complex as compared to GNOME. GNOME has easy to understand architecture. GNOME has got variety of modules that provide a wonderful user experience.
It lures me to contribute to open source softwares. I am in love with GNOME community and has plans to contribute to GNOME. The GSoC 2014 project under GNOME if gets approved will be my first significant contribution to GNOME and ultimately open source.
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