Jaeger projects for the current Outreachy round: Q&A
Jaeger is participating in the current Outreachy round (December 2019 to March 2020) and we are starting to receive questions about our possible projects. This blog post is a simple Q&A for this round and will be updated based on the questions we receive, either in private or publicly via the official channels.
Should I work on all the three projects?
No! We have three projects listed but the selected candidate will be expected to work on only one of them.
Do I need to know all that is listed there?
Each project requires a different set of skills. For the “Migrate OpenTracing instrumentation to OpenTelemetry”, only knowledge about Java is required. For the “Performance benchmarks for the client libraries”, you should have good knowledge of Go or Java. If you can bring some experience with benchmarks or performance testing, we can count that as a plus, but this is something we can help you with during the internship.
What about the “Research alternative data visualization possibilities for tracing data” project?
Glad you asked! This one is special as the scope is really broad. You are free to choose the tool that you deem appropriate for the job:
- If your idea is to show traces in a different way in the main UI, then you’ll probably need to know JavaScript/React, as that’s what the Jaeger UI currently uses.
- Perhaps your idea is to build images in the backend, to be displayed in the UI? Then you’ll probably need to know Go, as that’s the language our backend is written.
- Maybe your idea involves creating a new interactive visualization tool based on one or more dimensions available in spans, such as timestamp, duration, service name, service+operation name. In that case, use whatever you are more comfortable with.
In short: as long as your idea helps people to extract information from traces in new, interesting and clever ways, anything is possible and valid. A bit more about one of the motivations behind this project can be found in the blog post “Distributed Tracing — we’ve been doing it wrong”.
The decision about which candidate will be picked will be made based on the research proposal: write down what your ideas are and how you intend to approach it. The more concrete your ideas/steps are, the higher the chances of success. Come talk to us and we’ll help you establish which tasks you could perform during the selection phase.
As sources of inspiration, we can recommend the following web sites:
- https://flowingdata.com/
- http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/
- https://informationisbeautiful.net/
- https://www.visualisingdata.com/blog/
Questions?
If you have any questions about Outreachy itself, like the timelines, eligibility, governance, and so on, take a look at the Outreachy blog and website.
If you have any questions about Jaeger and the projects we have available for this round, get in touch with us via any of our published public channels. If you prefer a private channel, send an email to the mentor(s) listed in the Outreachy project page. Alternatively, you can contact the coordinator for the Jaeger participation on Twitter. Good luck!
