My Experience in LGM-SOC

 Hello everyone we all know that now a days open source has become a new craze between all of us we are just attracted towards. Few months before I applied in the LGM SOC as  I started contributing over there it help me a lot in merging my first pr in the open source project.letsgrowmore.in

To say in short: It’s a project of which the source code is open to everyone, and everyone is able and allowed to participate, be it by writing bugfixes, major changes, …

Most commercial products clearly don’t fall under this category, seeing as they’re in house and the code is only accessible to developers of that company.

Github, however, is filled with projects that are. All you need to do, is pull a project, create a branch, and start coding.

Of course, if you first get on the same page as the maintainers, the chances of your changes being merged into the master branch are bigger.

A very well known example of an Open Source project: Linux operating systems.
You find a bug? go ahead and fix it. You can later on add your fix to the operating system itself.

Really, you don't need to be a guru coder or a linux magician to be able to contribute to an opensource project. The real problem is to get into the community surrounding the project you want to help with, and in many cases the documentation is just lacking.

What I would recommend to you, is to start with a small project with a relatively small community. Start by asking questions, smart ones, on their forums or irc channels or mail lists. Asking smart questions will require you to read as much documentation as they have and probably take a peek at the code.

I personally had some failed attempts at helping in some projects, this is the story on each of them, so you probably can avoid my mistakes. The common thread in all this situations is that the projects were already gigantic, well known with a huge community behind them.

For the first project I wanted to collaborate, I got into their forum. I said there's this great new feature I would like to implement. I am not that seasoned at coding (I was still in university), so I would like your guidance to get the patch accepted. Their reply was: We don't have that good of a documentation, so check the code, think about the structures, write the patch and we will check whether is worth. I never came back.

Second project I wanted to help: I come to their mail list, I said I was very interested into what they were doing. The reply: The truth is that, despite this being an open source project they were all being paid by a huge company to do so, and they really didn't see the worth of having someone doing it as a hobby.

For my last failure, I just grab a ticket, I made a patch and submitted, without consulting to anybody. The patch spend some months being discussed, rewritten, and go on so on and so forth until I just got tired and stop working on it.

This was all I learned in the LGM SOC .letsgrowmore.in