Monday, May 7, 2012

GSoC 2012 Introduction

Hi, my name is Andrew (Drew) Rodman and I'm going to be working as a student for Melange this summer as my Google Summer of Code Project.

I'm excited to work with my mentor Daniel Hans, Lennard, Sverre, Madhu, and all of the other contributors that I have not yet had the opportunity to meet. I'll be working on rebuilding the invite and request modules for both gsoc and gci more or less from scratch in order to take into account issues that have arisen so that they can be eliminated without requiring heavy patching. I'll also be doing a little bit of template design work in order to make it more apparent how to invite mentors and organization admins to a program. I have worked previously with Google App Engine and have refreshed and expanded my knowledge by re-reading the GAE Python 2.7 docs regarding the datastore. I am also reasonably familiar with the Django framework and am currently in the process of figuring out "the big picture," or improving my conceptual overview of how Melange works. I'm also working on determining the specific requirements of the invite and request modules that I'll be working on since Daniel asked me not to look at the current implementation.

I'm excited to start this project and even more so to be working with a community of incredibly proficient developers in order to improve my own skill-set and hopefully make some friends within the Open Source world...in addition to gaining a long-term project to which I can contribute after the program ends.