KWoC Project report

# About KWOC

KWOC — Kharagpur Winter of Code is a 5-week long online program organised by KOSS for the students of various colleges, especially for students of IIT Kharagpur, who are new to open source software development.

Open Source Development is something that builds on the practical knowledge to build and try out codes which are used practically. Trying to customize and build features out of nowhere, is something that always fascinates me.

# Selecting Projects

My main motive to join KWoC was to get familiar with open source development. I had previously worked on android and java and had experience with other programming languages like C/C++. So I decided to select java android project. I selected plazzy99/VendorRelief and supu2701/OTES-App to contribute to. I also selected a compiler design project cimplec/sim-c to get familiar with bit of compiler design.

# Contributing to projects

1. My 1st project VendorRelief (plazzy99/VendorRelief) was an Android App to help people of India during this Pandemic of Covid-19 by providing them information about nearby services(grocery, pharmacy etc.) and many other information about Covid. I selected the issue in which I was require to fix login screen (login using phone number).
2. My 2nd project was cimplec/sim-c which is high-level front end for C which creates a dynamically typed syntax for C. User can write code in this high level syntax and then compile it to optimized C code. sim-C does not process the code and simply translates it to C thus, there is no possibility of the code running slowly. So, with sim-C users can write code faster using the high level syntax and at the same time be able to harness the power and speed of a C program. My contributions to this repository was very basic. I wrote 3–4 programs in sim-c language to help for testing of language.
3. Next I contributed to OTES-App (supu2701/OTES-App). This was an utility app which provides information about nearby emergency services, sends alert help messages, provides first-aid information and other precautionary measures. This app used Google maps apart from basic android services. In this I was required to add police station subsection to emergency services and fix few other bugs. This was the toughest issue which I encountered during this event and fixing it helped me learn a lot of concepts(especially about google maps). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXTC7EMBT1Y)

# Closed PR’s

1. https://github.com/plazzy99/VendorRelief/pull/15
2. https://github.com/cimplec/sim-c/pull/384
3. https://github.com/cimplec/sim-c/pull/385
4. https://github.com/cimplec/sim-c/pull/386
5. https://github.com/cimplec/sim-c/pull/394
6. https://github.com/supu2701/OTES-App/pull/23

# My learnings

KWoC helped me to understand the working of Git/GitHub and provided me a kick start for my open source journey. Apart from this it also helped me improve my knowledge for android development and and gave me a very basic idea about compiler construction.

# Conclusion

I would certainly suggest beginners to try out KWOC, to build up and enhance Open Source knowledge. It is really a great learning experience for your winters.