KWOC Project Report
# About KWOC
KWOC — Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program organised by KOSS for the students of various colleges, especially for students of IIT Kharagpur, who are new to open source software development.
Open Source Development is something that builds on the practical knowledge to build and try out codes which are used practically. Trying to customise and build features out of nowhere, is something that always fascinates me.
# Selecting Projects
Over the month, we were provided with lot of projects, and we had to choose as many as we want. Having learnt python, I wanted to try projects which were python based.
There were few projects that I wanted to try, namely Crick-Fev, gnewsclientand FB-Spider. Some of them were quite utility based, so I wanted to try and understand the code logic ; and add features as possible.
# Contributing to Crick-Fev and gnewsclient
I started my open source contribution, by cloning them to my laptop, and exploring the code-base. The first one, gnewsclient was a news-scraper, using google’s news feed. It was quite an interesting app, as on running it gave news based on locality, genres and topics. After exploring it, I wanted to try a simple issue: Refresh function for gnewsclient object. After inserting a new feature to refresh the data, I submitted a PR #4.
Correspondingly, I cloned the app Crick-Fev . I loved the concept, for I am a huge Cricket Fan. I explored the code-base, and glanced through the issues. At the time I cloned, there was some issue in scraping the details of the Cricket Scorecard. So I worked on it, and it was one of the toughest issue I worked upon. I submitted another PR #2.
#Contributing to the major projects
The major projects that I worked upon was in the app, FB-Spider, Youtube-DataCollector and MobOff.
FB — Spider
This app scrapes facebook post which are public, using Facebook’s Graph API. There was an issue, named making a GUI Version. I wanted to try and make a GUI version of this app, so I started learning about the basics of PyQt. After making the GUI version, I made another PR #47. My mentor Parth Verma, encouraged me to go through the issue, after facing few hiccups.
Besides making the GUI, I also added GIFs to complement the GUI made.
Youtube Data Collector
This was a Chrome extension, which users can install and keep a track of the videos, URL, Time-stamp of last visited and count of videos. I skimmed through the code-base and there were some issues in beautification of the extension. I learnt basic html and css, and tried to add colour changes in the app. After the beautification, it was a good makeover (PR #14). I also added the count and time-stamp for the videos(PR #17). My mentor also provided some valuable suggestions regarding the code-base, and altering it to make it ready for practical use.
#Concluding work
I was also making documentation contributions, as it is always useful to provide crisp and relevant info about the apps. I made numerous contributions to the above contributed projects, thus concluding the Winter of Code.
#My Thoughts
My experience with Kharagpur Winter of Code has been quite good, as the level of contribution is quite apt, considering for the beginners, and testing out all the aspects of Open Source Development. I also learnt the mannerism of communicating with mentors and all the people associated with this.
Special Credits to my mentor Parth Verma, who guided me through all this, and providing me with valuable feed backs, both as a friend and a mentor. I would certainly suggest beginners to try out KWOC, to build up and enhance Open Source knowledge.
Overall, I am looking forward to a good session of learning new languages, in order to complement my Open Source Contribution.
Links to the Repos I have contributed
Closed PRs
PR #47 ; PR #16 ; PR #13 ; PR #8 ;
Open PRs
