My mentoring experience- Kharagpur Winter of Code (KWOC)

The key to growing and maintaining a successful open-source community is by developing projects which can bring in new people, and help them become good contributors.

After my internship at GSoC, I decided to continue being a constant contributor to the open-source. This time not being an intern/ a part of open source events, but mentoring one. I thought it would be a good act to spend some time helping beginners become good contributors to the open-source.

So, I applied to mentor five of my projects from my GitHub in the KWOC portal. All of them were selected. This was an opportunity for me to grow my network, as well as build my portfolio as a mentor and enhance my projects.

About KWOC

KWOC is a five-week-long program by IIT Kharagpur, which aims at helping beginners get involved with open source. It is conducted in the winters and aims at preparing students for GSoC 🚀

My projects

I am going to give a short description of each of the projects which were a part of the event.

1. fetch: A community-owned REST API service for testers and developers. Fetch provides REST API endpoints for different types of placeholders, which can be easily used during testing and development without the need for creating sample data manually.
2. startup-incubator: A website to help startups and startup enthusiasts showcase their projects and ideas pre-release.
3. ds-algo-solutions: A collection of solutions for HackerRank data structures and algorithm problems in Python, JAVA, and CPP. This community-owned project aims to bring together the solutions for the DS & Algo problems across various platforms, along with the resources for learning them. Problems from Leetcode will be included soon in the project.
4. notation-converter: Notation-converter is an application that converts infix, prefix, and postfix notations from one notation to another, and also visualizes the process of conversion. This helps students easily grasp the fundamentals, such as the way of calculation, as well as the data structures used behind the scenes
5. The-Browser-Toolbox: A collection of personalized browser extensions to make browsing hassle-free

Feel free to explore the projects and create an issue if you find something that could be better.

Contribution stats

Since the projects which I mentored used a wide range of languages including Python, JAVA, C++, JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS, NodeJS, Heroku, DevOps, REST API, etc., they received a lot of contributions from a variety of contributors skilled in different languages.

The projects bagged a total of 420,000+ lines of code, 2000+ commits, and 80+ contributors 🚀🚀🚀

The project ds-algo-solutions was at the top of the project leaderboard with an exceptional amount of contributions! 🎉

A note for beginners to the Open Source

If you are a contributor to any of the above projects reading this blog, kudos to you! Keep up the good work!

I only have a few suggestions for newcomers to open-source to follow:

1. Learn Git
2. Write meaningful commit messages
3. Be sure to double-check before you commit your code
4. Do not hesitate to ask your doubts to your mentor/ fellow developers
5. Documentation and testing are as crucial as source code

Mentoring students and helping them in open-source has been a very pleasant and learning experience for me. I look forward to involving more contributors to my projects and expanding my community in the future.

Until next time. Goodbye. Sayonara. Or whatever.

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