A Great Experience ever in my life.

I am Gopa Vasanth, a freshman in Computer Science and Engineering from Amrita University, India. I am an active member of the Open Source student club of my University FOSS@Amrita.

Selecting Organisation.

This post is about how I started and working with MediaWiki, I first saw a large lists of organisations list as I was a newbie to open source this was a great task me pick one organisation, out of many couples of organisations fascinated me and went through those organisations and their projects, out of those MediaWiki attracted me, I am very dazzled with wiki's Ideas and projects.

Getting started with Mediawiki

I got really confused in starting of contribution then I got to know about the IRC channel and the mailing lists after a few days of effort I subscribed in MediaWiki mailing lists and then joined in IRC channel and in #mediawiki then finally in IRC few developers gave some links to documentation to get started, Then I went in to it got confused and hanged out there for few days.

Then I got to know for starting we have to setup mediawiki locally and then start learning required technologies to get started I followed Gerrit tutorial to get started configuration of mediawiki, While following the gerrit tutorial I got many internal errors I was really surprised and worried to resolve them I was using linux ubuntu, I slowly tried to Google those errors and resolved few of them and for some errors I got help from the developers community through IRC, I am very Thankful to all the developers in spite they are having their work answered all my silly questions with great patience then after fifteen days of struggle finally installed and configured mediawiki, then I followed the few tutorials to learn PHP to understand the codebase I started learning PHP and completed course in codecademy, Then through Phpstorm and Atom I went through the code base to understand the code I was so terrified by seeing such large code for the first time.

My First Patch

Slowly came to know about the MediaWiki bug tracker Phabricator and went to it searched for the few easy tagged bugs I spent 2 days in searching searching... I didn't find any of the bugs easy I was feared and again asked help in IRC then some developers helped me by giving small tasks to do and then asked me to select one bug and be committed until it get solved and then I selected one bug spent few days to just understand the task description and then searched for the code in my codebase finally that task is to change the Login button into bold in vector skin finally worked and after few days of work I made it. Then got to know the way of submission of the patch and submitted my first patch, I got +1 reviews from few developers I felt so happy and unfortunately got -2 review saying that that has to be done by designing team I felt too disappointed and worked on another few bugs and submitted the patches after the 3 months of struggle I got my first patch merged.

Never give up. Today is hard, tomorrow will be worse, but the day after tomorrow will be sunshine - Jack Ma-