Being interested in software developing, I was in search of a fine way to improve my coding skills. While I already had an internship in the industry and done several client projects, I wanted something different.
I knew about open-source development since I was really in love with those open-source products like android, firefox, linux and many more since they come to us with absolutely no any restrictions unlike many copyrighted products.
However, I felt little nervous to start on direct contributions with such organizations. So, I started a survey on available open-source projects for which I could start my contributions with. Google summer of Code archieve pages helped a lot in this process.
Sigmah was the project which took my interest. It was a java application which was the most familiar language to me. And, it used a postgreSQL backend as well. However, it was a GWT application. I first went through its user guide and demo since we must have a good understanding about project itself before going for development. The video on Sigmah gives a quick tour around the project. I hope you too are interested in watching it. Have a look.
GWT stands for Google Web Toolkit. This allows client-side programming using Java. This was a new technology to me. Usually, I like to have a background knowledge before diving into a new field since it will be a good precaution to find the path in a forest rather than to be desserted.
And, to start with my contributions, I went through the contributor guide. It clearly shows steps to set up the environment. With clear understanding on what we are doing, it was an easy task to set up everything. I think every opensource project has a good documentation and help in setting up them using the source.
Sigmah uses mantis bug tracker as their issue manager. Creating an account there too was a prerequisite. So, I was ready with all my homework done. And, my next task was to introduce myself to sigmah google group. I was welcomed by Olivier Sarrat who assigned me a suitable issue to solve as well. This was my first issue to be solved with. Sigmah code base was varse and I had to dive in it to solve the issue. It took a longer time, but finally i was successful. And, it was a milestone in my software developer life as the first open source contribution.
I then, solved another issue as well. And, I am in the process of solving another too. It is really interesting to contribute to Sigmah.