First Steps into GSoC

An inexperienced blogger and his first blog.

First and foremost, to avoid wasting anyone's time, I need to warn that this is just an introductory post to test the blog and the general approach. Also, and at least for now, I'm adopting a tag system so that people can either go to the kind of post they want.

• Weekly report - Objectively sums up the work results of a given week
• Brainstorming - Always GSoC related, but maybe vague, messy and informal
• Houston, we have a problem - Workflow of tackling an hard/interesting problem

Google Summer of Code is an initiative that allows a student to work in the summer, as a developer, in Open Source projects. Astonishingly, I was selected to work in one! A plugin Installer for Prosody! Astonishingly because this was my first serious proposal at a GSoC project. I feel there is an overwhelming amount of competition out there and right now I just feel very blessed to actually have been chosen O.o

Anyway, why Prosody and XSF. The absolute main reason why is because it is work in a new programming language for me, and one that is somewhat more low key than the overcrowded  javascript and Python. I wanted something that was interesting, that was possible to do in the summer and that was a bit more unique. XSF has the best of both worlds! After investigating a bit, Lua is renowned by its simplicity and efficiency, with a solid community support. XSF has participated many times before in GSoC, is as old as Google itself and I really liked the vibe of the community. Everybody seems friendly and passionate. Documentation is pretty nice and being able to mount a private server for messaging, with unlimited extension potential, also seems useful and interesting. Guys, its a winner!  Absolutely terrific 👌

Google recommends to log, somehow, one's progress throughout the weeks. Blogging, in other words! Let's say this is also part of developing my communication skills! That's what it really is! So here we are! On the road to success!... Too many exclamation points, you fool... !

Since this is my first serious attempt at a blog, I decided to use the free Blogger solution. At least for now it should be enough to train a bit. Invested some time and I could get some nice stylings around, inserted some cool images too. It also allows the use of gifs and movies, which is pretty nice. You can insert custom HTML, CSS and even customize the favicon!

Just like me practicing blogging!

There are a couple of questions that are swimming around right now. You turn out to the web and find all you can. Turns out you can find quite a lot. I'm checking quite a lot of places, related to GSoC guidance, besides obviously asking the people at Prosody for help, trying to get all I can. This blog is kind of a resume from the traditional helper site/post, which I found really nice: 

https://medium.com/coding-blocks/one-stop-guide-to-google-summer-of-code-a9e803beeda7

It included a video that I find particularly soothing:

 

Well.. I guess that is a pretty effective way of delivering guidelines. Even if he is talking specifically about his organization, I suspect the same goes for a lot of places 😅

That's it for now. In the upcoming blogs I'll talk a bit about the XSF, XMPP and the project itself.  Thanks for your visit, and feel free to leave your feedback, as it will most certainly be helpful.

João