My Kharagpur Winter of Code Experience

Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program for the students of various colleges, especially for students of IIT Kharagpur, who are new to open source software development.

I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and I stumbled upon this. I wanted to take part in Google Summer of Code. I had already applied for GSoC in 2017 but I was rejected because of lack experience and clarity in my proposal. So, I needed something which will help me in preparing for GSoC in a well organised manner. KWoC seemed to be the right choice for me, so I registered myself for it.

The next step is to choose a project in which I want to contribute. I am comfortable in working with two languages Javascript and Python but I decided to stick with Javascript.

My mentor for the project was Naveen Kumar Sangi. I messaged him on Gitter and he replied me with the instructions for proceeding.

I was already familiar with Git work flow so I just forked the repository and cloned it and dived right into my first issue.

My first issue was to add screenshots to Readme.md. This was an easy one so I was done with it within 10 minutes. When I made my first PR I found that my branch had diverged from the remote master branch. Naveen told me to rebase my branch and update my PR. I didn’t knew about rebasing because I never did it, so I had to read an article given by Naveen. After that I successfully rebased my branch and my PR got merged. Below are some screenshots of my PR.

My second issue was to add browser based notifications i.e whenever a file is uploaded by user, the user should be notified on successful upload.

My mentor suggested me two methods to handle this issue:
a) Add a React notification component.
b) Use native HTML notification API.

I went with the second method because in that case I don’t have to add a new dependency in my package.json.
Below is the code snippet I added to tackle this issue.

With the above two pull requests I passed the mid-term evaluation successfully. After that I got very busy with family functions and couldn’t contribute much. I wanted to be a part of KWoC and I didn’t want to give up like this so I took another issue and started working on it.

My third issue was to add password based file encryption i.e encrypt the file with the password on successful upload.

My mentor suggested me to use npm module multer for file uploads. However I found that doing this with multer is not possible because methods like fileUploadComplete were deprecated in the new version. So, I used another npm module formidable for file uploads.

Using formidable I was able to achieve the task and made my last pull request on 31st Dec.

Since PiZilla is an open source project I’ll continue to contribute to it and fix the pending issues whenever I get time.

KWoC was an amazing program and it taught me a lot of things. It helped to achieve what I was looking for that is a proper way to proceed for GSoC. I would like to thank my mentor Naveen for helping me out in every possible manner and answering all my silly questions. Also, thanks to IIT Kharagpur — KoSS for organising such kind of event. These kind of events motivate students to work towards open source.

I will definitely recommend people from my college to take part in these kind of events. Also, I am looking forward to work on some more open source projects by KoSS.

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