My KWOC'20 Experience
Tags: opensource, github, beginners
Published: 2021-01-06 19:20:25

> Kharagpur Winter of Code (KWOC) is a 5-week long online program for students who are new to open source software development. The program helps students to get involved in open source and also prepares them for many open-source summer programs; Google Summer of Code is one of them.

# About Event

If you are a beginner who is looking to work on Open-source projects of GitHub under the guidance of a mentor, then KWOC is one the best open source community program organized by IIT Kharagpur open-source society. 

IIT Kharagpur is one of the most prestigious engineering colleges in India.

This program is generally targeted for beginners who have little to zero experience in open source project development and contributions. 

This event will help you practice working with version control tools like Git and a popular source code management platform GitHub.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/sd7qq5tbiia11zyqgjqb.png)

They have this awesome [website](https://kwoc.kossiitkgp.org) which I think is one of its kind, unique and attractive. You can check out all the projects which are part of this event under the Projects section.

There were more than 150 project with different Tech stack. You can choose the project which you like and start contributing to it. You can contribute to as many projects as you can. 

There were different discussion channels to discuss your issues with project admins and other mentors. They will help you and guide you if you face any difficulty while making a pull request.

You could track your progress with your student dashboard. Yes! They provide you with your dashboard to track your progress. I have never seen such a thing any of open-source programs. 

It's really impressive.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/6ksopr7rgxd8omsk2j90.png)

It showed projects you have contributed to, pull requests you had made, issues you had opened and much more. 

This was the best part of their event. I am impressed with this kind of efforts the community had put to make the event successful.

# My contributions

## 1. Productivity-meter
I worked on a project named Productivity-meter. Check out the project repository [here](https://github.com/Raghwendra-Dey/productivity_meter). 

The project was about creating a stopwatch for programmers to track their progress by tracking the time it took to solve programming problems. 

Earlier the project was looked like this.
 
![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/dhdpee2kyr0v9znl0fra.png)

After the contributions period, this was the final progress when different people worked on different issues.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/kubrmqw9ked9qtfou6p2.jpg)

The buttons in this project which you see in the above image were designed and contributed by me. It was my contribution to the project.

You can check out my PR [here](https://github.com/Raghwendra-Dey/productivity_meter/pull/37)

## 2. Guess Movie

Another Project in which I contributed was Guess-Movie. This project was a front-end project which was designed to give details about movies.

Before the contribution, the project looked like this.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/s5l34aiplh499ho64rxo.png)

I worked on the front-end part of the project and made it look more attractive.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fv42n93r0jgeilitejyo.PNG)

You can check out the pull request I made [here](https://github.com/shrinish123/GuessMovie/pull/19)

# Other contributions

Apart from these two projects, I contributed to documentation part of **more than 10 projects**.

# Conclusion

This was my 5 weeks journey. I enjoyed working on so many different and beginner-friendly open source project.

If you are looking to work on an open-source project, then stay tuned for next year's KWOC.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my article. Comment down all your thoughts and I would like to answer them.