domingo, 7 de junio de 2015

My motivation and how I got started

Hello all,

It's been a busy couple of weeks. The GSoC has officially begun and I've been coding away but before I go heavy into details, I think I should give a brief introduction on how I found SciPy and my motivations as well as the reasons why I think I got selected.

The first thing to know is that this is my first time contributing to OpenSource. I had been wanting to get into it for quite a while but I just didn't know where to start. I thought the GSoC was the perfect opportunity. I would have a list of interesting organisations with many sorts of projects and an outline of the requirements to be selected which I could use as a roadmap for my integration with the OpenSource community. Being selected provided an extra motivation and having deadlines was perfect to make sure I stuck to it.

I started searching for a project that was novice friendly, preferably in python because I'm good at it and I enjoy using it but of course, the project had to be interesting. Long story short, I found in SciPy a healthy and welcoming community so I decided this might be the perfect fit for me.

The first thing I did was try find an easy-fix issue to get the ball rolling by making my first contribution and allowing one thing to lead to another, which is exactly what happened; before I knew it I was getting familiarised with the code, getting involved in discussions and exchanging ideas with some of the most active members of the SciPy community.

In short, what I'm trying to say is: find your motivation, then find something that suits that motivation and get involved, do your homework and start contributing. Become active in the community and things will follow. Even if you don't make it into the GSoC, joining a community is a great learning opportunity.

Cheers,
Abraham.

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