Winding up GSoC’20
GSoC’20 — The good thing about 2020
So the Coding Phase finally comes to an end, and a few more days to wind up everything. GSoC has given me a great learning experience and an opportunity to be a part of a community and work to build something which will be used by many. In this blog, I will summarize my experience. I was selected as a student in AnitaB.org Open Source.
My project Open Source Programs changed its track during the Community Bonding period from an application with a fixed purpose to being a very dynamic, processing and automating, application.
Planning
The Community Bonding period is spent mostly on planning the project and creating a roadmap of everything you will be working on. Also, you have fun sessions and get to know the community better like Coding standards followed or practices preferred. The better you can plan out your work here, the lesser challenges you face.
Coding Phase
This basically involves you writing code, working on mentors’ reviews, developing the features and lots of learning. Not just writing code, you need to document everything for further reference. It’s not just your work on the project, but there will be many more people who will be contributing to it later on.
Challenges I faced
While planning and discussions things look like a smooth run, but you never know what problems may come in between. Sometimes, debugging simple things also become complex.
Uploading to AWS bucket — My project involved uploading files from the frontend to the AWS bucket, but there is no specific documentation on how to do it using ReactJS. So this part took a lot of time as I faced errors while doing it, and really needed a lot of research to figure out a suitable way.
You may have a look at this blog I’ve written to try its implementation:
Sendgrid Email feature — My project needed integration for sending emails, and I chose to go ahead with Sendgrid API for this purpose. The documentation was not that great so that I could easily implement things. Simple things like variables to be used and how flexible we can get with testing were missing. Have a look at this blog for the approach:
Maintaining Code quality and Documentation — While referring to the documentation of various services I need in my project, I realized the importance of good documentation. Your project doesn’t get hits if it isn’t documented properly. Since my GSoC project, was a from-scratch project, good documentation was necessary as it would have future contributors and more feature additions. Also writing code that can be easily understood and modified based on future requirements was a necessity in this project. I had to concentrate on all these factors while making a contribution, which made me aware of the coding standards and techniques being followed globally.
Blogs
During my Coding Phase, I penned down my experiences in Medium blogs weekly. Do give them a read —
- API testing using Postman and Newman
- JWT Authentication using Django REST Framework
- Why prefer Server-Side Rendering?
- More into Redux…
Inviting Contributions
There are tons of new features and developments which can be done in Open Source Programs project. These contributions will help you learn a lot and expand your knowledge. Not just already discussed ideas, we do need wonderful ideas which everyone can come up with. If you are looking to contribute here are some important links —
Happy Open-Sourcing!!!
