2: GSoC18 at LibreHealth - Community bonding ends, CODING starts!

The first phase of Google Summer of Code 2018 closed on May 14th. This door closes and the CODING door opens to the room where REAL work is done. This later door opens to a room that is very interesting and full of commitment, motivation and attaining goals related to our GSoC18 projects. In this piece, I ‘walk through’ the community bonding period at LibreHealth.

What is community bonding?

The first month of GSoC is the Community Bonding period. This phase is intended to help you get ready to contribute to your mentoring organization full time in late May. Talk to your Mentor now to understand what they expect from you over the next few weeks during Community Bonding, and throughout the program.

STOP!!! Read the FIRST article of my Google Summer of Code 2018 journey before continuing with this piece.

The Experience; So far so good!

We’ve gone this far at LibreHealth, and torn the community bonding part of the GSoC18 calendar. This part of the program is very important and defines the success level of your project in the coming weeks.

Like always, the experience has been a good one. During this period, I’ve been involved in a couple of activities. These have given me more knowledge and understanding of the organization, code base, members and my mentors.

So… what did I do during this period?

1. Setting up development environment.

My plan to build a report generator could go with normal PHP, JQuery and Bootstrap. However, Priyanshu Sinha(mentor) and me chose to use the Laravel framework because we have plans of moving the entire code base to Laravel. Plus, Priyanshu had started work on Laravel at LibreEHR in last year’s GSoC.

A new LibreHealthEHR Laravel repository was created that carries the work Priyanshu and I have (and will) been doing. This repository will be the next LibreHealthEHR code base.

2. Submitting patches and bug fixes.

During this bonding, I’ve done some work by adding a log process to track the changes that are made to encounter forms (Misc. billing forms actually). This process is the beginning to prepare for a form generator.

This process of submitting patches and bug fixes will go on through out the entire GSoC period. We’ve been doing it before, and we aren’t stopping now.

3. Helping new members get along (Code review, approval and merge).

At LibreHealth EHR we had a new contributor Mangi Elijah, who is new to programming and open source. Normally he had issues setting up. Team alpha helped him get along. We’ve also helped Mangi get some Git documentation written for our organization. Right now (May 16th) Mangi is fixing an issues that I raised concerning the menu items for encounters.

4. Define and planning project.

This is the part where communication is very important. I wouldn’t say this aspect has been set yet, but we (Pri, Art and me) will have this figured out. The project definition is set already. I understand what has to be done for now. We just have to decide on how to do certain specific things related to the project now. In short planning has been completed for now.

Conclusion

I’ve always heard the GSoC experience is fun and interesting, but I guess I underrated the fun. It’s absolutely amazing talking and interacting with people from different backgrounds, and cultures across the globe. We have the same goal and interest of building a complete EHR system at LibreHealthEHR, and are all collaborating towards achieving that goal.

We talk like we’ve known each other for a long. It’s really great having friends and mentors you may never meet. Uhhmmm, hope to meet Terry Hill, Priyanshu Sinha, and Arthur Eaton someday.

I look forward to having a good coding phase with my mentors and team-alpha mates; Perseus, Naveen, Apoorv Choubey, Abhinav Singh, and Mua Laurent.

Are you new to open source??? Even if you’re old Open source contributor, why not join LibreHealth, and start writing code to save lives!

Do you still want reasons to join an open source community??? Find them here.

Thank you for reading!

READ the THIRD PART of my Google Summer of Code 2018 journey.