PROJECT REPORT OF KWOC

KWOC | KHARAGPUR WINTER OF CODES

PROJECT REPORT

ABOUT KWOC

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.

It was November29 when I stumbled upon Kharagpur Winter of Code site. Being new to open source development, this program was really fascinating for me. I wanted to take part in Google Summer of Code, but I was unaware of the procedures, working of the program which made me less confident. This program seemed like a stepping stone into contribution to open source world. I went forward and registered, and did the initial formalities.

CHOOSING THE PROJECT

The next step was to find a project which would be suitable for us to contribute to. There was a list of projects available. Every project were mentioned along with the details of mentor of the same. I skimmed the project details, and searched for a project which I could contribute tirelessly. I ended up bookmarking 2-3 projects. All of them where on python as I knew only python and Java as the two major software languages.Though there wasn’t any restriction on choosing the number of projects to contribute. I thought it’d be better to just concentrate on a single project rather than losing focus on multiple projects. At the end, I picked up the project – SNAKE. It s a project to build a Popular Snake game using Pygame for desktop. Now my biggest hurdle was to learn PYGAME. So I took a book on python multimedia and started learning the basic commands and also too some of the help of the online video resources available.My mentor was Raghav Jajodia being a very helpful mentor. I previously used GIT as it was taught in a workshop conducted by KOSS itself.

SUBMITTING THE PULL REQUESTS

PULL REQUEST NO : 1

1st December 2017

The first pull request I made on 1st December 2017. When I first entered the Game, I found a very odd welcome to the users. So I added some Images at the starting and ending of the game so that it looks as a warm welcome. The pull request was merged within two to three days. The name of the commit was JUST MADE THE INTRO AND END COOL.

This was I first pull request I made into someone’s code repository to develop an application.

PULL REQUEST NO : 2

2nd December 2017

The next thing I felt that playing a snake game without some obstacles was too easy for someone. So I made my next pull request on the very next day. The name of the commit was Added blocks to Snake game. My idea was to add some blocks on the path of the snake and if the snake hits them then the player is disqualified. It took hours to compile the code and mainly debug the errors but I completed it.

This is the first time I faced problems with GIT. I faced a lot of problems regarding the commit and I made many mistakes. I simply cannot merge the code I have written. I also got many humiliations from my mentor for my fault. But at last studying the materials provided by him, I was able to solve the merge conflict and at last the PR got merged into the main code repository. All thanks to my mentor.

PULL REQUEST NO : 3

14th December 2017

This is the last pull request I have sent to the code repository. The main issue I found out that my mentor was asking to add a control panel. But I thought that the Game must be also allowed to play on the mouse. So I added all the equivalent controls on the mouse. The name of the commit was Snakes without keyboard. It was dated on 14th December 2017.

I was busy with my robotics workshop in the mean time. When I was ready to commit, I found the entire code base got changed. I was in a deep shock. I again re-based my code and added the necessary changes. At last I was successful on resolving the merge conflicts and finally the code got merged into the main branch.

VERDICT

Even though, KWoC has reached to its end, since it’s an open source project, I could contribute to it anytime. I’ve planned to fix the issues mentioned in the coming days.

Huge thanks to RAGHAV JAJODIA for bearing my silly questions and addressing every single one of them. Do read his website http://jajodiaraghav.github.io/ on his experience being a mentor of projects in KWoC and GSoC and several other achievements. If it wasn’t him, this whole process would have taken weeks and the learning curve would have been tough. Lot more to learn from you. Thanks again! 🙂 Also thank you IIT Kharagpur, KOSS for hosting a beginner friendly program, and making sure the learning is maximum. Hoping for more events like this in the future, and make sure it’s for all college students, so that people like me can be benefited from it as well. 😀

my GIT Hub link : https://github.com/AadiCool

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