[xwiki-devs] [GSOC] First coding period started

Hello Buddhiprabha, Yesterday we entered the 'Coding' period of the Google Summer of Code 2013. There are some things that need to be mentioned about GSOC that could help any student contributing to XWiki: = Mentorship = We prefer open mentorship. While your assigned mentor is the one officially in charge with your guidance, almost all interaction should be done 'in the open' as much as possible, on the IRC channel or on the mailing list. You should choose the communication medium according to the importance of the matters to be discussed: naturally, the less important issues are to be discussed on IRC, while the design decisions, important progress announcements and testing/feedback requests go on the list. This way, the community is informed on the evolution of your project, and other developers can come up any time with useful ideas and suggestions. Moreover, if your mentor is hit by a bus (the bus factor [1]), another developer can take his place with little effort. = Communication = Sitting alone in your room, working secretly on your project is definitely a bad approach. However, please keep in mind that too much communication can also be harmful, as it distracts the others from their own work. You need to be able to communicate just right: - provide meaningful information about your progress, - ask the community's opinion on non-trivial design or implementation decisions - avoid wasting a lot of time on a problem, when a more experienced developer (or a student that fought the same problem) could quickly provide you an answer; however, do try to find the answer yourself at first. Wrong: "Where do I start? What do I do now? And how do I do that? Is this good? It doesn't work, help me!" Right: "Since a couple of hours ago I get a strange exception when building my project, and googling for a solution doesn't seem to help. Looking at the error, I think that there's a wrong setting for the assembly plugin, but nothing I tried works. Can someone please take a look?" Subscribe to the devs list (if you didn't do this already), and start monitoring the discussions. It is also recommended to subscribe to the users list, but not mandatory. The notifications list is a little too high volume and technical for the moment, but it is a great knowledge source. = Development process = The project's lifecycle is NOT design -> implementation -> testing -> documentation. [2] We invite you to adopt a test driven development [3][4][5] approach and to experience agile development [6]. After the first coding week, you must have some code that works. It won't do much, of course, but it will be the seed of your project. Every functionality will be validated by tests. The code must be properly tested and commented at the time of the writing (don't think you'll do that afterwards, because in most cases you won't). We encourage you to do __at least__ weekly commits (ideally, if you are well organized, you should be able to commit code that works daily, so try to aim at daily commits). This way, the code can be properly reviewed, and any problems can be detected before they grow into something too difficult to fix. One big code blob committed at the end, no matter how good it may seem, is a failure at several levels. = Documenting your work/progress = We expect students to document their work/progress in 2 ways: 1) Design page in the Design [7] space on xwiki.org GSoC students should create a Design page where they document technical aspects of the feature they are working on: architecture, use cases, problems, various solutions with pros and cons, etc. This page should be written as an XWiki community member and not a GSoC student (there is the progress report for that), ensuring that the page will remain relevant even after the GSoC period ends. 2) 'Progress' section of the GSoC project [8] This is the place where the students set their goals (milestones and deliverables) and where they report their advance towards completing them. More details and examples are available at [9][10][11]. = Conclusions = Since we are already in the coding period, there are some things that need to be done: 1. Answer this mail :) 2. Create a Design page [7] regarding your project 3. Start idling on the IRC channel 4. Start chatting on the mailing list and on IRC about your project and other aspects of XWiki that you don't yet understand 5. Get your hands dirty by diving into the code and fixing Jira issue 6. Talk about your project We want to know what you don`t understand about XWiki, what issue you are planning to undertake, what you want to start with, etc. It helps you more to start saying incorrect things and fixing them early instead of staying quiet and making a big bad choice towards the end. And a last thing, please remember that one-to-one conversations with your mentor are not encouraged and are actually harmful to the success of your project. Talk to the community, ask for help early and life will be sweeter. According to the timeline [12], you have 6 weeks of work available until the mid-term evaluation. Please make sure you have the conditions for success [13] in mind throughout all of the 12 total weeks of GSoC coding. Happy coding! Ecaterina on behalf of XWiki Mentors [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development [4] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321146530/ [5] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201485672/ [6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596527675/ [7] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/ [8] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/WebHome#HSelectedPro… [9] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/DocumentingStudentPr… [10] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/SOLRsearchcomponent [11] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/Responsiveskinbasedo… [12] http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2013 [13] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/GoogleSummerOfCode/WebHome#HConditionsf…