/ OPENSOURCE, DRUPAL, GSOC

My journey in to GSoC

About my project: My project needed to port the Commerce Instamojo module and all its features from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. This module will allow a user to do payments instantly by creating a link. After porting its features, the Form API will be used to create various forms for collecting details of customers and payment requests. Finally after this project Drupal 8 will have a working Commerce Instamojo module through Drupal Commerce, which can be downloaded with the help of Administrative Interface, GitHub, and composer. Experience with Foss@Amrita: From being a fresher who didn't know what Linux was to getting a GSoC, FOSS@Amrita has played an important part in making me what I am today. With mentors and friendly seniors to guide me, coming to the FOSS lab was like coming back home. When I was introduced to Google Summer Of Code, like everyone else I thought this was something totally out of bounds. I chose Drupal as my mentor organization. The beginning steps of contributing to open source software involve fixing bugs. It may sound like a cakewalk but I faced a lot of difficulties in understanding the issue in the first place. But with the help of the Drupal community and my seniors, I figured my way out of these problems. There were times when I just couldn't figure out what was wrong with my solution. Exasperated as I was, I would lose hope and think of giving up but the people here would always encourage me to go on and try harder. My failures turned to stepping stones with the motivation and guidance from the excellent mentors here. I credit every ounce of my success to this club and its people. Experience with my organization: Drupal is one of the most active organizations in Google Summer of Code every year, and I am glad to be a part of it. Initially, it was difficult to figure out and solve a bug. In fact, it took me almost a month to get my first patch merged. Meanwhile, I started digging into the documentation which was indeed a very beneficial thing to do as not only did it help me in understanding the codebase better but also boosted my confidence. Open source is all about patience, patience to keep trying and striving hard. I just followed this simple advice and got my first successful bug fix, after which there was no turning back. Currently, I have 20 successfully merged patches with 10 code commits. The mentors assigned to the bug were very responsive and guided me through all my queries. All of these factors played an important role in me being a recipient of GSoC 2018. Drupal has a very systematic way of working with a super awesome community. I would continue contributing to Drupal even after my GSoC and would definitely suggest open source enthusiasts and developers contribute to the immensely rich codebase of this organization. My experience in working and fixing bugs for Drupal has been an awesome one:) My journey of contributing to open source software and eventually getting a GSoC wasn’t an easy one but as they say it- 'It's better to try and fail than not try at all’!