What is Winter of Code? Do we code in winter? Kind of.
Winter of Code is a program aimed to increase participation for the Google Summer of Code program among students in colleges and universities.
Well, I was actually a participant in Winter of Code 2019. At that time of the year, things were pretty tight for me, and I didn't even want to participate.
Why?
- I had doubts that my code would be judged.
- I didn't have much technical experience. To be completely honest, it was just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- I had conversations with other participating members, and they had so much to contribute.
Participation is important — you'll never know how you would have performed unless you actually performed.
But I participated anyway. I had great mentors, and it was an amazing experience. I learned a lot, from knowing nothing about open source or Git to understanding concepts like making a PR (pull request) to a Git repository, branching, keeping your fork in sync, and more. I picked up almost all the basic-to-intermediate concepts of Git and GitHub. Until then, I believed there was no difference between Git and GitHub.
Structuring my Proposal
- Index Page: where at the top I wrote Project Proposal: (Project Name) followed by the index of contents of my proposal.
- Contact Information: Section included basic details like Phone no, Email, College, and Degree.
- Project Proposal Brief: This section included every detailed step I was going to take if I got selected and every issue I was going to fix.
- About Me: This section included a link to my resume and a brief introduction covering my involvement in tech clubs and my projects.
- Previous Experience Section: I didn't have any experience working in internships or organizations, so I wrote about my projects and how the first one laid the foundation for the second one.
- Timeline Section: (I missed it.) It's important to lay out how much time you will take to complete each subtask and to list every subtask in a routine.
The basic idea behind Winter of Code is to prepare students for GSoC, so rarely does anyone get rejected, but you still need to present your proposal the way you would if you were applying for GSoC.
All communication with mentors happened on Slack in 2019. The project that I worked on was Vison-WoC-Frontend.
Thanks for reading. Winter of Code is definitely worth participating in.
Website: winterofcode.com