It's been three weeks since my last update. A lot has happened since! For those readers following my blog for interest's sake (and not as part of your administrative duties), you can expect another update in two weeks. Hopefully you don't feel too left out of the loop.

However, I've got plenty of exciting news to make up for the gap in communications. We've gone from tutorials and user consultation to a nearly-complete first iteration of the application, already deployed to the main OpenHatch site. Now, you may notice the site link leads to an effectively blank page. As we currently don't have any production data, I've included some screenshots to give you a preview of the site in action!

Pair programming

Over the past few weeks, Asheesh and I have engaged in regular pair programming. After our first successful experiment with the Django for Designers tutorial, we moved onto site-building efforts. As this is my first time working on an MVC web project, there's been lots to learn and being able to have my questions answered instantly has made the process so much smoother. While I learned to value a powerful IDE during my last stint as a real Software Development Engineer™ for the effective 50% productivity boost, I get the impression that "pear programming" has given me another 200%. While not 10x, I guess 3x isn't too shabby. Fruitful.

We've been using Google Hangouts for voice/video chat and VNC for screensharing. We set up a series of deadlines for deliverables and tracking items for each one. Here is a weekly play-by-play of development thus far.

gsoc14.4 deliverables

• Foundation for the site and initial bug set models.
• View all the bug sets in a list.

Here's this week's tracking item and a code sample.

Figure 1: Basic view, list of bug sets

gsoc14.5 deliverables

• Annotated bug models for within each set.
• Many-to-many model with the bug sets.
• Bug set view.

Here's this week's tracking item and a code sample.

Figure 2: Basic view, bug set

gsoc14.6 deliverables

• The initial iteration of inline-editable fields.

Here's a code sample for this week.

Figure 3: Enhanced bug set without project names

What's next

I will be focusing on my community involvement for the next week (gsoc14.7); in particular, I will be attending Open Source Bridge with (most of!) the rest of the OpenHatch gang. Beyond that, we have moved some deadlines around a bit. gsoc14.8 will see the refinement of the inplace editing introduced in gsoc14.6, and gsoc14.9 will finally provide the web interface for building a bug set for an event.

Community involvement

A significant portion of my contributions in the past three weeks have been dedicated towards the OpenHatch community at large. In particular, I have been performing maintenance duties on oh-mainline. The majority of OpenHatch contributions are made to oh-mainline, so there are always a number of pull requests to review.

Given my familiarity with the codebase, I am reasonably qualified to review and merge code, and have been doing so whenever I can. Since the begining of the summer, I have merged nearly a dozen pull requests on both oh-mainline and oh-bugimporters. The most satisfying to merge are obviously PRs that resulted from the May 11 sprint :)

Of course, this has led me to become more familiar with the team of OpenHatch contributors and the community at large. I think this has been one of the most important parts of my GSoC experience thus far, and so I'm really pleased that next week's activities are exclusively to these ends!

Open Source Bridge

One of the most exciting parts of receiving Google Summer of Code funding is that I have the chance to fly to really distant cities for project-related opportunities without dipping into my modest student budget. Asheesh and I discussed a few options for the summer, including a trip to San Francisco (similar to the hackathon week UCOSP holds), but in the end we decided on attending Open Source Bridge. It seemed like the obvious choice: for one, I had intended to visit Portland while I was working in Seattle over the winter, but never had a free weekend. And of course, as I've stepped up my community involvement significantly over the course of the summer, being able to mix with a huge community of open source aficionados has a certain appeal and obvious value.

Open Source Bridge will take place in Portland, Oregon from June 24–27. I will be attending as an affiliate of the OpenHatch organization. Further updates sure to come with the next blog post. I'm incredibly excited: this is the first time I will represent OpenHatch in any official capacity. A year ago I could have never foreseen myself representing an open source project in any official capacity, so this is a really significant next step.

Obstacles

For the last few weeks, time management has remained my largest obstacle. Fundamental to any undergrad degree are procrastination, cramming, and weekly crises when the assignment deadline rolls around. I was able to keep a pretty good handle on things until this week (gsoc14.6) when two midterms and an assignment due date coincided. Unsuprisingly, panic ensued. As a result, we decided to move the deliverable deadlines a little bit. As midterm season is now over, the largest hurdles should have been jumped.

Good planning means that these deadline push backs won't be a problem though. We anticipated delays in deliverables, so we are definitely on schedule to ship a polished app for the end of the summer. I just wish it was going faster. :(

Asheesh may have given the most eloquent advice on the matter: "Be disappointed! Be a little disappointed... and then get over it."