Hi and welcome back to my blog!

Unfortunately, the contest is coming to a close on Monday. The past 6 weeks have been fantastic for me, and I will be forever grateful for that.

In these 6 weeks, I learned almost as much about programming and coding languages as I learned the entire year. I had previously participated in the Google Code-In contest with FOSSASIA, in 2015, and that had made me curious and motivated to learn more about open source and especially web development – I created an open-source mastermind game which was highly appreciated by everyone at my school!

At this year’s edition, I was much more active since the very beginning of it. I joined the team’s Slack channel, where, as time went by, I got to know some remarkable people, both students and mentors, who helped me through, gave me coding advice, made us laugh, made us celebrate (the Open Event Server recently hit 2000 merged PRs! :tada:).

Throughout the contest, I tried to contribute to the FOSSASIA projects as much as I was able to. My school exams limited my contributions, but I’m still content with what I’ve accomplished. I created the Social Media section of the (gci16.fossasia.org) website, alongside with the mentors section, the latest issues, the contributors section and the website footer. I fixed numerous issues of other FOSSASIA repositories and learned how to deploy an app. I revamped the UI of the phimpme Android app in accordance to the Material Design guidelines and fixed some bugs there as well. My favorite task must have been creating a Python scraper and converter to collect events and convert the data to match the Open Event format. I ended up being a maintainer of the GCI repository! Yay! :blush:

I want to contribute to FOSSASIA and open-source in the future as much as it will be possible, and make even more meaningful contributions. As soon as I know Java well enough, I’ll start solving issues related to the Loklak Server and their Artificial Intelligence bot, Susi AI.

Their work doesn’t stop here, as they are continuously developing new apps and tools that people from all continents benefit from.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank this wonderful community I’m part of. A great “Good job!” to every newbie I helped, you’ll get better as time goes and you’ll be able to create something amazing one day. A big THANK YOU to all the mentors for all the advice, the suggestions, the encouragement and the help you’ve given us to help us succeed (besides the two founders, Hong Phuc Dang and Mario Behling, additional thanks to Jigyasa Grover, Hemant Jadon, Robby O’Connor, Princu, Nicco Kunzmann, Saptak Sengupta for being around most of the time to help us and give directions. You rock :+1:). We’re sorry if we annoyed you with our tasks, I guess we just ran out of patience :stuck_out_tongue:. I made many friends in this contest, the ones I got along with best being Gaeun Kim, Ankit R. Gadiya, Mostafa Elgayar and Kaisar Arkhan. We agreed that we must make a project together after GCI, and I’m very excited about this.

I learned a lot in this contest, about open-source, teamwork, helping others, I got the chance to use new technologies previously unknown to me, I met new people who knew much more than I did, and all that has motivated me to become better. THANK YOU!

Come join the open-source side! Visit fossasia.org to get started on your wonderful journey!