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My friends used to poke me for writing long messages while texting. I thought why not benefit from it? I have led communities, ran startups, built viral apps, and made youtube vlogs.. Yes, I am an engineer.
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I was a fresher in college, exploring web development or in simpler terms HTML, CSS and JS. I Got to know about Hacktoberfest. Made a few contributions to some small open-source projects and got my goodies for participating in Hacktoberfest. I updated my LinkedIn bio with "open-source enthusiast". Life was going well. And then I came across GSoC and understood what open source actually meant. My bubble regarding open source burst very early. It is much more than submitting 4 PRs to get a t-shirt.
After being rejected in the GSoC'21 proposal round, my gloomy eyes fall upon a poster of C4GT edition 1, just when the closing ceremony was to be conducted. Let me tell you one thing about me, I am a very curious person. The first thing I did was to join the C4GT discord server. So, the program has ended. But I went ahead and messaged on the general channel, asking if there is any way I could contribute. Little did I know that this was the start of something magical which will keep me under its control for the next 1 year. So what is this C4GT?
C4GT, as some of you might know, stands for "Code for Gov Tech". It is an initiative by Samagra-X to build a community of developers who can contribute to Digital Public Goods (DPGs). If that wasn't clear, I got to know UPI and DigiLocker were some prominent examples of DPGs. These examples were enough to motivate me to know more about C4GT. I did the most predictable thing. Reached out to one of the contributors to understand more about the program. She was kind enough to let me know about her experience and what was the application process. One may think, this is not needed as most of the info is already out there. I will come back to why reaching out to people is important. However, This wasn't it. My curiosity knew no limits and I made it my plan to become a part of this community.
I spent weeks wandering on the discord server hopping from channel to channel, solving the doubts of fellow beginners who came wandering like me regarding C4GT. Finally after 2 months, in the now inactive server, I saw my ray of sunshine. One of the projects had some good first issues up for grabs. And my curious mind saw this as an opportunity to get engaged with the community. I took up the issues. And then came the most difficult part for me, actually working on solving them. In my defense, I was a student with an intermediate knowledge of web development trying to solve an issue that needed sufficient knowledge in making admin dashboards. while I was able to solve one issue and get the PR merged related to unwanted dependencies in the project, I struggled to find a fix for the second one. Due to my time commitments, I did what sounded best to me at that point - unassigning myself from the issue. I felt so bad that I could not complete the assigned task. However, instead of going inactive on the issue and deserting it, I replied promptly when I realized I won't be able to solve the concerned issue at that point. But this experience of getting my first PR merged into an actual open-source project was enough to ignite my interest. The little contribution that I made, turned out to be super helpful in the future.
Finally, after months of wandering, I found my agenda. The plan was to grab a spot in the next edition of C4GT. I decided to not let go of this opportunity in the future, whatever it takes. While 90% of my motivation was related to the fact that I will get a chance to contribute to a DPG project, the remaining 10% of my motivation came from the amazing stipend the program carried with it (around 75k INR in the first edition). I had just completed an internship where I got paid 10% of the C4GT stipend for 3 months of work. The fact that I could possibly earn 10 times of my internship stipend in just 2 months was a catalyst to my aspirations. I prepared a multi-step strategy.
Get on a call with the previous year's contributor to understand more about the program.
Learn new skills, so that I don't have to do that digital walk-of-shame on any assigned issue ever again in the future.
These were my top 3 priorities while I waited patiently for the summers of 2023 for the next edition to begin. Did I apply for the second edition? Did my strategies sown last year reap any sweet fruit of selection or did they prove to be futile, Stay tuned to my C4GT blog series as I share my unfiltered experience about C4GT.
Yours Truly
Void-ness
