It was the year 2010 and I was into
a 6 month internship which was a part of my Bachelor’s Degree. Somebody
reminded me that the year’s GSoC program has been announced. Before I tell you
anything more, I think I need to tell you about how GSoC was viewed by us at
University of Moratuwa.
To us at University of Moratuwa,
the GSoC was a big deal. By 2010, the University has topped in terms of the
number of proposals accepted for a couple of consecutive years and everybody
was so excited about the program. There was a strong motivation inside the
university towards contributing to FOSS which encouraged students to apply for
GSoC while the GSoC itself made people more aware about the FOSS world,
creating a spiral effect. So all in all, winning a GSoC was something to be
proud of at Mora.
So, determined to win a GSoC
project I started exploring the project ideas. Let alone the project list, the
organization list was so long. However, I found this interesting project idea
in phpMyAdmin’s idea list which was about adding charts to phpMyAdmin. This was
somewhat related to what I was doing at my internship. But I did not have any
experience with FOSS communities. Communicating in mailing lists, going through
code and documentation to understand the architecture, submitting patches was
all new to me. But I did not have any choice; I communicated my interest on dev
mailing list and started exploring the code. phpMyAdmin had a strict selection process
where the students were required to submit patches to show their familiarity
with the code. So the next logical step was to chose a bug from the bug tracker
and submit a patch, which would have been little easier if I were more familiar
with GIT, the version control system phpMyAdmin was using. phpMyAdmin wiki and
other documentation was my savior, providing much valued insight into the
project; I read every page of them.
It was very fascinating to see
some of my patches getting accepted. Some patches received feedback from
developers on how to improve and not so lucky patches got rejected. All in all
it was quite interesting to contribute with phpMyAdmin project. I was enjoying
the process very much. Then came the accepted list of GSoC projects for the
year. Nope, you guessed it wrong, my project was not there! Someone else
probably submitted a superior proposal. Was I sad? May be. But I was already
enjoying contributing to FOSS.
After a couple of months, my
internship had ended and I was back in the University. It was those days where
you have more than enough time to do whatever you like. So why not fix a couple
of bugs in phpMyAdmin! More interactions on dev mailing lists, more patches,
more feedback and I was enjoying working with phpMyAdmin. Then came a surprise,
an email from one of the project admins of phpMyAdmin asking whether I am
interested in joining the phpMyAdmin team. I was over the moon, happily surprised,
sent a reply saying yes. That is how my FOSS life began with phpMyAdmin.
To be continued …
