GSoC 2024: An Introductory Post

From Me to You

I’m Bharat Tyagi, a third-year Computer Science student. I enjoy exploring things which is probably why I am here, writing this post for you all :). I’ll be working on Workbench this summer with my mentors Sonny Piers and Lorenz Wildberg.

My Journey with Linux and GNOME

I stumbled upon Linux when my phone needed a revival and only Linux had drivers for it. I only extensively started using Ubuntu at the beginning of college, and since then it has been a fun journey. The terminal is beautiful and knowing your way around it I think is an essential part of the ecosystem.

GNOME had been with me all along (considering I used Ubuntu and then Fedora) but always in the shadows, until recently when one of my extensions stopped working because it needed to be compiled for a more updated version of GNOME. I went looking into Github repositories and got to know about this wonderful desktop environment. I always enjoyed my distros because of how easy they were to use. Currently, I have settled for Fedora as my main, and I am enjoying what it has to offer.

Let's dive into some of the good stuff

I’ll be working on three things inside of Workbench, the first being porting the existing demos to Vala (An object-oriented programming language built for GNOME developers).

Secondly, building a new Library for Workbench. As the Library grows bigger, the vertical stack of demos makes it harder to look for a specific demo. To amend this we will be working on a new design that will make it easier and faster for everyone to navigate and search through demos.

The final piece of this puzzle will be implementing a more optimized code search using sqlite (blazing fast searches on the way!)

To Conclude

I think if it weren’t for the wonderful community members helping me during my initial contributions with their insights, I wouldn’t have been able to learn and progress at all. Therefore, I’d love to give back and help as much as I can.

I am excited about GSoC and thankful to my mentors for the opportunity. I also appreciate your time to reach this far into the post. I’ll be targeting bi-weekly updates, stay tuned for those! Until then