The Beginning
The summer has begun and the moment for which we had been waiting since the past so many days has come. It is time to get started with RGSoC this year. Let’s familiarise you with our team -
Students - Nupur Baghel & Paavini Nanda
Both of us are undergraduate students at NSIT, Delhi, majoring in Computer Engineering. We are best friends and buddies since day 1 of college. We have been sharing our rooms and memories since then, and obviously being partners in crime! 😈 (just kidding) , in coding and in the wonderful program which we are all a part of -> ‘RGSoC’.
Mentor - Josh Matthews
Josh is the most experienced person in our team. He has been working with Servo since almost the beginning and considers Servo like his own child. Are we right Josh 😛? Needless to say he is the most helpful person without whom we couldn’t have started with Servo and reached our current state. We really value your efforts.
Supervisor - Rakhi
Rakhi is a previous RGSoC student with Servo. She is the best person to know what our current level of understanding of the project must be, as she herself has been through the same phase. She is responsible for catching hold of us all and making sure we are doing things on time. Happy to have you with us! 😁
Coaches - Manraj Singh & Gauri Kholkar
Manraj is our super senior in college who works as a Software Engineer at Practo. He is a community leader at DuckDuckGo and has a lot of knowledge and experience in Open Source. Since he started the open source community in our college, we were sure he would be as excited as we are, to work with him. It is not of much surprise that he happily agreed to coach us! 💃
Gauri is an experienced Rust programmer who did her internship with Mozilla under the prestigious Outreachy programme. We came to know about her from the RGSoC page itself, where she had mentioned that she wanted to coach a team for Servo. She is a happy and cheerful person indeed. We plan to trouble her with lots of doubts this summer 😜
The journey till now -
We got to know about RGSoC when seniors from our college Prachi and Ipshita got selected for it last year. After that fine day, we wanted to be a part of such a program which could help us contribute to such a large community under the mentorship of talented and experienced people.
So we made sure that we started looking for organisations on time. By mid-January, even before the organisations were finalized, we started making our mind on which project to apply for. We started understanding and making small contributions to our first project. But after few days came the shortlist of projects…….A small set back for us, the project that we wanted to apply for didn’t get selected :(
But nevermind, we began looking for some other projects. We took one more week, installing new code bases and getting in touch with mentors and the community, figuring out which project was the perfect match for us. We finally narrowed down on Servo, Mozilla. It was something scary and challenging for us:
It offered us Rust, a completely different programming language. We had worked with C++ and Python before, but Rust was different. It had features from more than 10 different languages. Primarily it was safe, fast and concurrent! 😎 It had a really large code base with more than 2000 live issues. Also, we had never ever got the unique opportunity of working with browser engines.
So we decided to get our hands dirty. We implemented our very first API DOM Doge Api in Servo. We were able to do it only because of the blog post written by one of the past RGSoC scholar who gave insights into how a basic API can be built and how the workflow of the whole API should be. This task was something that we were able to complete within a day (But it was literally a lot of effort, solving the small errors that came up each time we tried to compile the code.)
Ahh, we were so happy :P
Then we started implementing our own functions in that API. It was interesting to see the code we wrote working in a browser.
By this time we had started feeling a bit confident about writing some code in Rust. We then pinged our mentor Josh to ask for his feedback and we asked him to suggest us some already existing beginner friendly issues in Servo. He was really helpful and guided our baby steps to start with our work. He also made us aware of the type of issues which would help us with our work in RGSoC. We wouldn’t have been able to solve our first issue if we would not have received the help from the community members through the IRC channel of Servo. The people in open source are awesome. We still remember, how we were stuck on a very simple thing and asked silly questions but there were patient people who helped us with all the doubts.
For the rest of the month of February, we kept working on some more issues, taking help from our coaches and mentor and celebrating after every PR getting merged 💥 We liked the project so much that we decided to invest all of our time and energy into one project only despite the fact that selecting two projects increases the chances of selection. We were motivated to make some substantial contributions for such an awesome community.
Simultaneously we also started working on our application which is extremely crucial for being selected. We would like to specially thank Aishwarya and Prachi, who helped us by reviewing our application and making sure it’s perfect! Finally, we would like to thank each other. It was our strong bond of friendship and support which lead us to applying for RGSoC together as a team.
We hope we have awesome 101 Days of Summer 😉 with Servo.