1: GSoC18 at LibreHealth - The ball is rolling with LibreHealth.
BANG BANG, I’ve been accepted for GSoC 2018. BANG BANG BANG, my proposal to work on LibreHealth’s EHR system was accepted. I put in lots of CONSISTENT effort in order to have this opportunity. My consistent work, and sleepless nights paid off when I received the email from GSoC program. I didn’t have to read it all, it was obvious when I saw the subject of the email: GSoC 2018: Congratulations, your proposal with LibreHealth has been accepted!
After seeing that I was like,
What is GSoC: Google Summer of Code?
Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work on a three month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.
Google Summer of Code is program to promote open-source development by Google every summer since last decade. It runs for 12 weeks and students contribute to open-source repositories. They get a stipend from Google and it’s a great way to spend summer vacation.
What is LibreHealth?
LibreHealth is collaborative community for free & open source software projects in Health IT, and is a member project of Software Freedom Conservancy.
Currently, LibreHealth has 3 projects which are LibreHealth EHR, LibreHealth Radiology and LibreHeatlh Toolkit. Join any of the projects and start contrinuting.
How it started
I joined LibreHealth’s forum on 17th September 2017 with the intention of learning how to code and communicate with others remotely. I am more that happy with what I have learned so far in the community. Hitherto, I had very little knowledge of PHP, JS and HTML5. Now I can boast that I know 3 times more.
The community is made up of great, experienced contributors like Terry Hill, Arthur Eaton, Tony McCormick, Priyanshu Sinha who were always ready and willing all ‘stupid’ questions I asked. I learned a lot about the code base and fixed some issues, opened new issues and worked on them. With this little experience, I mentored Google Code In 2017 at LibreHealth.
My GSoC18 Project: Report Generator for LibreHealth EHR
This project is focused on building a drag and drop tool that is capable of generating reports from the user’s chosen fields. The current reports in the EHR system can not be changed with altering the code, work which TOO MUCH for non-technical users. The report generator enables end-users of the system to be able to generate reports for almost any given situation. You can read more about the project here. In order to follow the progress of this project during and after this GSoC period, do that here. The project proposal is found here, and it carries more details. My mentors for this project are Arthur Eaton and Priyanshu Sinha. Technically, Terry Hill will be a mentor too since he has lots of ideas for the generator.
What is happening now?
The community bonding period for GSoC lasts less than a month, and it started on 23rd April.
This period is to connect with mentors, and other organization members. The aim is to understand the community better, get to know your mentors well, and understand what you have to do as project. This period is really important, and it’s a determining factor of how the last 2+ months of the program will be.
I’m looking forward to connecting with the community, getting my development environment set, finishing some fixes I’d started and planning my project.
It’s almost impossible for me to express all the gratitude and happiness I feel now. It’s been an amazing time with the community, and I know it’ll continue this next 2–3months. Firstly, I’m grateful to God. The EHR team has contributed greatly to my current situation: programming, communication and collaboration. Big thanks to Terry, Art, Pri, Tony, Robby for the confidence they have in me.
I look forward to having a great and ‘cody’ summer at LibreHealth, collaborating with other team members, and making new friends.
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 SECOND PART of my Google Summer of Code 2018 journey.