GSoC [02]: Making Bonds, And Breaking Codes

It’s been a little more than two weeks since the declaration of the projects of Google Summer of Code 2018, all the joy of getting selected is now superseded by the anxiety of the curves of the “learning roller coaster” I’m about to sit in.

The past two weeks went by me so swiftly; getting selected in GSoC, end semester getting over, enjoying the last days before Summer break at college, and coming back home. Only once I reached home, that I started with the community bonding period in practice.

I was already well in touch with my mentors and the CCExtractor community as a whole. I started to hang out on the channel more often, though I wonder if that was any different from what I had been doing before. The first step in the community bonding period was setting up the development environment and getting to know what all I was supposed to do, and this is the “breaking the code” part; reading already present work’ source code and forming a raw mind map of modifications to be made.

Soon after getting selected, I was given access to multiple resources as a student developer for CCExtractor and this includes, but is not limited to, CCExtractor’s development server and wiki write access. These are, definitely, powers to be wielded with responsibility. I was not particularly comfortable with the server provided due to my campus network’s restrictions, and hence resorted to using my own server for most of the task and…

wait for it…

accessing the development server through my server by SSHing into it first. Damn! Is it only me who got reminded of inception?

As soon as the setup was done, I found myself sitting on the chair munching over articles day and night; the topics included decorators in python, context managers, Continuous Integration, unit tests and much more. It has been a steep learning curve, at times giving me all night headaches. Alongside learning new cool stuff, I was getting my hands dirty in solving issues over CCExtractor and, sigh, that was all I ended with; dirty hands!

The best part of this learning process was the realization that most of the part which we never even think about, logging, exception handling, testing etc., constitute the backbone of a project made for production. It also made me aware of the vast pool of free tools available to make the process of development simpler.

The curls I crept on, maybe, are about to get curvier; more learning opportunities, more responsibilities, tighter schedules, and with all of this, lots of fun.

Today marks the beginning of the first coding period and I can feel the pressure. The pressure is innate; not that someone is putting it, but a constant inside force to give me best.

Glass is given its shape, not by an external wind but by internal blows