GSoC’18 Coding Phase- Week 1

After the warm & welcoming community bonding period came to an end, with us being familiar with our mentors & mockups, timeline being finalised upon with great granularity in terms of the tasks to be completed, now began the most interesting part of GSoC- The Coding Period! Yayyy! Time to grab a cup of coffee and start coding! :D

During the community bonding period we decided to migrate the from Jekyll codebase to the MEAN stack (M- MongoDB, E- ExpressJS, A- AngularJS, N- NodeJS).

So, the first week in the coding phase involved me setting the up an angular app. Now the biggest hurdle that lay ahead for me, while doing this task was the fact that, existing codebase should be kept intact with all the links working while shifting from jekyll to angular. I started learning about routing in Angular. I used Angular CLI to generate the various components, to be linked & then implemented routing.

The next task in hand was to create a navigation bar. Angular allows routing which allows us to create Single Page Applications. Routing in Angular helps one show different contents in an application based on a different route that is chosen. This means that for my website, I can have the header & the footer as constants, being always at the top & bottom, and depending on whatsoever the query is, only the middle portion of the website gets updated. This helps make the app faster as well as increases the modularity of the code. I used the Angular components to create the navigation bar as per the prototype decided upon by the mentors.

Also, since my project was an existing project, the most challenging aspect was to maintain consistency for the previous code base while making new changes!

My project manager & my mentors have been really considerate & allowed me to make the angular app from scratch, something which I really wanted to do but was not mentioned in my proposal. But, given my comfort with making it from scratch, my mentors agreed to it! :)

So ya! That’s it from the first week! Stay Tunes for updates :)