“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”
I am pleased to share that I have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2020 under Wikimedia Foundation!
I believe that Open source projects are a great way of developing quality products by working together with other developers. I have always wanted to contribute to projects that I myself use to give back to the Community.
Back in my school days, I remember using Wikipedia extensively for assignments and projects. Now to be working for Wikimedia feels like such a privilege.
Getting started
The project I will be working on is Upgrade WebdriverIO to the latest version for all repositories. My Google Summer of Code Proposal can be found here. My project is concerned mainly with the Selenium Tests. I will be following a breadth-first approach of first upgrading all the repositories to v5 and then upgrading them to v6.
Week 1 (4th-10th May)
Highlights:
- Accepted Projects announced!
- Learnt more about the community.
- Co-ordinated with my mentor and fixed meetings for the coming week.
- The week ended with the Wikimedia Welcome Party. It was great meeting and interacting with the community and fellow students. I also learnt that I share similar interests with a few of them. ( How awesome is that? :v:)
Week 2 (11th-18th May)
I had daily meetings with my mentor Željko Filipin. These meetings set a direction, a route which helped me learn more about my organization’s structure, practices and work flow. My mentor showed me what skills and coding practices I needed to familiarize myself with which would lead my project to the best possible destination.
Highlights:
- Read the Technical contributor onboarding and completed the micro tasks mentioned.
- Went through the Code Review Developer Guide for a better understanding and making the code review process faster and convinient for the reviewers.
I read the CL Author’s Guide. My learnings can be summarized as follows:
- The first line should be a short, focused, and to the point summary of what is being done by the CL.
- The rest should be an informative description of the problem and the approach followed.
📌 Note: Any shortcomings to the approach, should also be mentioned.- Background information such as bug numbers, benchmark results, and links to design documents (if relevant) should be included.
- Learnt that CLs should be as small as possible. Additionally, read about this here.
Gained knowledge on the continuous integration infrastructure. CI is managed by the Release Engineering Team of MediaWiki. The applications used are:
- Gerrit (code review)
- Jenkins
- Zuul status (Gerrit/Jenkins gateway)
- Started implemenation on the ContentTranslation repository.
- Sometimes the most minimal change comes by making no change at all!
- Started implemenation on the WikibaseCirrusSearch repository.
- Last meeting of the week ended with a smile! 💜
In the coming week, I might have a coding session with my mentor where I can learn more about his coding process. I’m really looking forward to it! To the amazing weeks coming up! 🍻