In this post, I’ll be describing my journey of GNOME’s OPW (Outreach Program for Women).

The beginning

I came to know about this program on 18th April, 2013 through my father, so a big thanks to him for apprising me of such a great opportunity on time.

Meta-CPAN

At first sight, Perl projects caught my eye, since I mostly prefer Perl for most of my programming related tasks, so without giving even a single thought I just forked Meta CPAN repostiory on github :D. But when I told about this to Ashish Shukla, he asked me not to do it, because it’s quite heavy and will work slow on my laptop. So I dropped my plan of contributing to Meta CPAN.

Debian

Then again I went through projects’ list. This time I thought about exploring Debian projects. I sent a mail to Debian mentors and to my surprise, I got their reply on the very next day :). I installed debian with the help of Ashish Shukla. We installed it successfully. But sigh :(, wireless was not working on Debian, so I decided to leave it because I had not much time to put efforts :(.

Wikimedia

Again, I went through projects’ list. This time, I chose Incremental Data Dumps of Wikimedia. I joined its IRC channel, but again sigh 😦 Mentors were not available due to weekend :(.

Twisted

In the meantime, I was exploring other projects. Then my friend Himanshu, suggested me Twisted. After going through Twisted’s description, I found it more interesting. So, I decided to contribute to Twisted :). I went through this O’Reilly book on twisted for getting familiar with Twisted as a user. Then I asked Itamarst (my first Twisted mentor) for an easy ticket on which I can work. He and exarkun suggested me to start with a documentation ticket because it’ll make me familiar with Twisted’s coding standards. So I chose some tickets from this log, given by exarkun and submitted my first very very simple patch :). After submitting my first documentation patch, I started working on my first coding ticket. Though it was not accepted , but I enjoyed working on it :). While I was working on Twisted, Itamarst said that he won’t be able to mentor me because he’ll be available only for Boston applicants, so keturn aka Kevin Turner decided to mentor me.

Writing my APPLICATION (the most boring part)

Well, this was the most boring part indeed, but I managed to write it with a help of a sample application :).

What! Perl projects didn’t get any applications! Sigh 😦

After submitting my Twisted application, I came to know from Marina Z. that Perl projects have got only few applications and Twisted got many applications. Due to my Perl background, Marina asked me to try for some Perl project, only if I’m interested.

Moose & Dancer

On Marina’s suggestion, I thought of contributing to Dancer, I PMed Sawyer X (Dancer’s mentor) on IRC, but didn’t get any reply due to weekend.  I cloned Dancer’s repository from github. In the README file, I saw sukria’s blog’s URL. I read that blog and came to know about Dancer2. Dancer2 uses concepts of MOO and at that time, I didn’t know Modern Perl.

From this page, I got to know about one more Perl project, Moose. I think I overlooked Moose, when I checked out Perl projects first time. Though I never heard about Moose earlier, but I tried exploring it a bit. I came to know that Moose uses concepts of Modern Perl.  Seeing this similarity between Dancer2 and Moose, I decided to learn Modern Perl from this book. I also conversed with my Moose mentor, Shawn. Shawn helped me to grasp some of the Modern Perl and Moose’ concepts. I enjoyed Moose a lot. I came to know from Sawyer that Dancer has got some applicants, but Moose got none. So finally, I decided to contribute to Moose :). This is my first contribution to Moose 🙂 Here, is my OPW application, you can take its help for writing your OPW application 😀

Credits:

I would like to thank these people:

My father: for telling me about OPW

My mother: for constantly encouraging me to do better 🙂

Ashish Shukla : For helping me whenever I got stuck 🙂

Himanshu Gusain : for suggesting me Twisted 😛 :D. Saying thanks on his humble request 😛 😀 hehe

Itamarst, Jean-Paul Calderone and whole twisted team: For helping me in my first contribution :). For answering even my stupid questions 😀

Kevin Turner: for answering my questions related to Twisted, testing, reviewing my patches, OPW timeline and application

Marina Zhurakhinskaya: for encouraging me to contribute to Perl project 🙂

Jesse Luehrs: for merging my branch with master, for telling me about git rebase, git describe etc.

Shawn Moore: for helping me to understand Moose better, for telling me about weird things in Perl (“0 but true”) :D, for reviewing my patches, for helping me in writing my timeline and application, for telling me about git add -p and many more things 🙂

All team members of Moose, who answered my questions whenever I got stuck 🙂