My Journey Through Fossasia’s Codeheat Contest

Better late than never. Academics have been pretty hectic lately and I finally got some time to pen down my experience through fossasia’s Codeheat (In the heat of code) Contest.

There was always something that fascinated me about the web.I started out with web development in the first year of my undergrad and over the summer I thought it was time to apply these skills on some real projects. So I was looking for an open source organisation to contribute and sharpen my skills, and that’s when I came across fossasia. The community was so welcoming and wonderful and the Open Event project (eventyay) just caught my eye.

So let me tell you a little bit more about fossasia’s Open Event Project. Open Event project is a fully-fledged event management system along with its own website generator and android app generator. You can find more about the project here.

I started out with the Webapp repo of the Open Event project of fossasia in September last year and actively contributed to it over the next two months(and learned a lot !!). I also started contributing to the Open Event Orga Server in the meantime. Thats when I heard about the Codeheat contest. Code Heat or aptly said ‘In The Heat Of Code’ is a coding contest with a focus on three projects:

• The Open Event Orga Server

• AskSusi Project

• Loklak Project

I continued contributing to the server project whenever I got some free time. Meanwhile I also mentored in Google Code In for fossasia(What a lovely experience it was, but thats a topic for a whole another blog post). Then came the End semester Winter break in december(Yay!! to some free time). And thus began a coding streak and I tried to contribute to the project, solving issues, adding features as much as I can. I got to learn some exciting new things and practices as I continued solving issues. The project became a whole lot active during this period and it certainly was a lot of fun contributing to the project. The maintainers of the project Saptak Sengupta, Niranjan Rajendran and Org admin Mario Behling were also very helpful and provided useful insights when solving the issues.

Time sure does move fast. I continued contributing to the project and in no time it was february. It was pretty late at night and I was just scrolling along my twitter feed when I noticed a tweet from fossasia announcing the winners of the Codeheat contest. Boy was I nervous !! I immediately clicked on the link and found out that I was among the grand prize winners. And all those nervousness was gone suddenly and I felt really happy and excited.

So I’m now planning to attend the fossasia summit (which is awwesommeee !!) in Singapore and hoping to meet new people, learn about new technologies and expand my horizons in the world of open source. I’m also looking forward to contribute more towards making this project a great success. Thanks Hong Phuc Dang, Mario Behling and fossasia for this wonderful opprtunity.