GSoC 2010 : Week 1(Community Bonding)

Hello Everyone!
My first week as a GSoC student for Melange has gone by :-). I had the first few meetings with my mentor (Madhusudan) and am right now feeling very excited about my project. Here is a short summary of the week and updates on my GSoC project:

I had a couple of meetings with my mentor where we discussed about my project design and other high-level details as well as some technical stuff. Here is a brief overview:


About my Project:
To develop and integrate a social features module into the current soc framework. The purpose of the module is to help users participating in the programs (such as GSoC) to get to interact and find out more about their fellow GSoC'ers and where they are from, what their project is about and anything else which they want to share with the rest of the community such as events they are organizing or would like to attend etc.

More Specifically:
As of now, there are two main features we have decided on at this stage:

• Google Maps + Calendar
  This feature allows users to find on a global map users, events, meets etc. based on location (hopefully reducing the quantity of "i-am-from" emails on gsoc-students-mailing list), organization, type of project etc. The Calendars will be used to show mainly details of events and meetings occurring within a certain date range for a certain organization etc.
  
  
• User Pages
  Once you locate users on the global map mentioned above, then more information can be found about them through their user pages. Users can use this page to share their personal/professional profiles, details and updates on their projects, their blog feeds.

The above is very brief and a more detailed version is available here.


Venturing into the Melange code-base...
To get started on the task of getting to know the code, my mentor suggested I could take up an issue and fix it. So I asked the team for the most suitable one and took up one (issue 890). After a good amount of trudging around in the code (and some tips from my mentor :-) ), I am on the verge of fixing it! And it has definitely helped me to get familiar with the architecture and code.

In the coming week:

• Work on a more formal specification of the project design, features and work flow (to be added to wiki) and frameworks, APIs to be used.
• Fix another bug (issue 884)
  
• Start thinking about actual implementation details (idea of how the code might be structured etc.)
  
• More meetings with my mentor :)