Journey of a mechanical engineer to open-source contribution
MY INTRODUCTION
My name is Mohammed Mohsin. I am a third year mechanical engineering student. I am really interested in software development especially development involving use of machine learning algorithms. Being from a mechanical engineering background i always had a inferiority complex , and always felt inferior to my CSE peers. I started learning programming languages and did some ML projects, but always used to feel that I am lacking the skills that a ideal software engineer should possess. Then I heard about KWOC through LinkedIn and registered for it. While I registered for KWOC I had a hope that by exposing myself to competitions around me , I would be able to learn much more things than what is provided by online courses. Prior to KWOC I had a little bit knowledge about open-source contribution and git commands.
JOURNEY OF KWOC2020
I heard about KWOC a little bit after the registrations were ended that was around December 6. So my seniors suggested me to registered even though the dates had passed. One of our college seniors also had their project in KWOC and I start reading and understanding their library. LETHICAL was the project where I worked and contributed. Initially I tried to execute the existing library using some sample codes, and then started understanding the code. Out of 5 issues issued by my mentor , I was able to solve issue 2 which was to provide proper comments to code and maintain proper documentation of the functions involved in coding. I had a prior knowledge about git and commands, hence I forked and then commit my changes into the library, and requested my mentor to merge my commit. Within a day, my changes were revived and some changes were suggested which I successfully changed. And the commit was finally merged into the main branch of LethicalAI. I felt really happy about my contribution to LETHICAL and I was able to clear mid-evaluations of KWOC.I had a few problems during mid-evaluations maybe a technical glitch which was solved by the KWOC team later.
LEARNINGS FROM KWOC2020
KWOC helped me understand real software world and how programmers collaborate amongst themselves. Till now all I used to do was watch tutorials and do projects following YouTube videos. Open source contribution really helped me understand how a real software application works and how developers collaborate with each other so easily using GitHub. I also came in contact with founder of Lectical who was my mentor throughout KWOC who helped me a lot during my contribution.
I thank KWOC for giving an opportunity to express myself as a coder being from a non-coding background and helping me gain confidence and motivation to continue coding.
I hope to continue my journey of open source contribution and learn more about software development.
