Introductory Post

Hello everyone! 😄

I'm Utkarsh Gandhi, a 20-year-old, second-year B.Tech student. I have been coding for a few years now but had never contributed to an open-source project before. My seniors advised me to participate in GSoC as it is the best way to start contributing to open source projects.

I looked at a lot of organisations, but none of them seemed right. Then finally, GNOME caught my eye. I had been using the GNOME desktop environment and its applications for a year, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to give back to this organisation. I knew this would be the right fit for me.

I started contributing to GNOME (more specifically Nautilus) around mid-February this year. I chose Nautilus as it is one of those applications which I use on a daily basis, and it just seemed logical to try and contribute to the app which is really important to me. 

As this was the first time I was contributing to an open-source project, I was extremely nervous about how to get started. But the community members were really polite and helpful and gave me a lot of guidance during the first few weeks which made it really easy and fun for me to contribute :D

Fast-forward to June, and I am glad to announce that I have been selected as a contributor by the GNOME Foundation for the "Revamp New Documents Sub-menu" project in Nautilus for GSoC '22. My mentor is @anotniof, who has been extremely helpful ever since I started contributing.

My project aims to design and implement a UI for the New Document creation feature in GNOME Files (Nautilus), which is a UI front-end project.

I'm excited to work on this project and have a chance to give back to this wonderful community. Looking forward to an amazing summer! 🎉

This is my first post for this blog, and I plan to post updates on my progress every week or two on this blog, so stay tuned! 💫

Thank you for reading 😁