GSoC 2020 — Community Bonding Period
GSoC 2020 community bonding period has come and gone. It took a long time for me to finish my article. However, this is an update about my community bonding period. If you don’t know how GSoC happens, then let me explain what the community bonding period is. So what happens here is we are getting ready to start the implementation of our GSoC project. There are several things to be done in this period.
- Setup the repository — If you are working on a new project then you have to create a repository for your project in your organization. If you are working in an existing project then your organization admin will add you to the organization and the repository.
- Get to know your mentor — You can use this period to get familiar with your mentors. You may have different time zones and you can discuss comfortable time slots for both of you and any other things related to the project.
- Set up communication channels — You will have millions of things to discuss with your mentors and org admins throughout this project. So it will help if you can discuss and fix your communication channels before starting the coding phase. In my case, we had Gitter channels to communicate and in Jenkins, they have nicely organized chat communication channels. So it was really easy for me to set up in those communication channels. Also, you must take a meeting weekly with your mentors. So its better if you can fix that as well.
- Getting familiar with the code-base — You can use the community bonding period to get familiar with the code-base. Also if you have enough time it’s better to create one or two pull requests in this period as well. It may or may not be related to your project. But both cases will help you to get to familiar with the code-base. In my case, as I mentioned in Path to GSoC — 2021, I started contributing to this project even before the application period began. So it helped me to get familiar with the code-base.
- Creating tasks — You can create the tasks that you are going to finish during the coding phase. You can use a project management tool that you prefer. Most of the time there are some default project management tools in your organization. You can use that as well. You can discuss this with your organization.
If you have done all the things I have mentioned, then you are almost ready to start the coding phase. There may be some other things to be done according to your organization. For example, I had to update my project on the Jenkins website. Also, you can discuss your timeline and also about the deliverables, that you are going to do during the coding phases. It’s always okay to do changes in your timeline with the help of your mentor.
As I mentioned before if you have done all these things and still you have free time it’s okay to start coding. In my case, I started working on a task, which is not directly related to my project. I had to extract and feed configurations from a YAML file. In this period what I did is validating the XML configuration file. It helps to understand my project as well and my mentor helps me a lot to direct me the correct path.
So those are the updates about my community boding period and let’s meet with a blog post on the Coding phase soon. Good Bye.
