GSoC Half Way Through

As you may already know, openSUSE participates again in GSoC, an international program that awards stipends to university students who contribute to real-world open source projects during three months in summer. Our students started working already two months ago. Ankush, Liana and Matheus have passed the two evaluations successfully and they are busy hacking to finish their projects. Go on reading to find out what they have to say about their experience, their projects and the missing work for the few more weeks.

Ankush Malik

Ankush is improving people collaboration in the Hackweek tool and he has already made many great contributions like the emoticons, similar project section and notifications features. In fact, the Hackweek 17 was just last week, so in the last days a lot of people have already been using these great new features. There were a lot of good comments about his work! and we also received a lot of feedback, as you can for example see in the issues list.

But even more important than all the functionality, is all Ankush is learning while coding and working with his mentors and the openSUSE community, such as working with AJAX in Ruby on Rails, good coding practices and better coding style.

The last part of his project will include some more new features. If you want to find out more about his project and the challenges that Ankush expects to have, read his interesting blog post: https://medium.com/@ankushmalik631/how-my-gsoc-project-is-going-4942614132a2

Xu Liana

Liana is working on integrating Cloud Pinyin (the most popular input method in China) on ibus-libpinyin. For her, GSoC is being an enjoyable learning process full of challenges. With the help of her mentors she has learnt about autotools and she builds now her code without graphical build tools For the few more weeks, she plans to learn about algorithmics that are useful for the project and, after finish the coding part, she would like to go deeper in the fundamentals of compiling. Read it from her owns word in her blog post: https://liana.hillwoodhome.net/2018/07/14/the-first-half-of-the-project-during-gsoc-libpinyin

Matheus de Sousa Bernardo

Matheus is working in Trollolo, a cli-tool which helps teams using Trello to organize their work. He has been mainly focused on the restructuring of commands and the incomplete backup feature. The discussion with his mentors made him take different implementation paths than the ones he had in mind at the beginning, learning the importance of keeping things simple. It has been complicated for Matheus to find time for both the GSoC project and his university duties. But he still has some more weeks to implement the more challenging feature, the automation of Trollolo!

Check his blog post with more details about the project: https://matheussbernardo.me/gsoc/2018/07/08/midterm

I hope you enjoyed reading about the work and experiences of the openSUSE students and mentors. Keep tuned as there are still some more hacking weeks and the students will write a last blog post summarizing their GSoC experience.

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This blog post original version can be found at https://anamaria.martinezgomez.name/2018/07/21/gsoc-half-way-through.html This blog post’s content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.