The Knight Blog

First phase of GSoC

· Rajul Jha

Just as the commencement of monsoon fill the streets of Aligarh with water, similarly my mind is clogged with ideas and heart is filled with emotions. For the past few weeks, I have been working diligently on fossology. I am writing this blog to tell you about my experiences working on the project. The highs, the lows, absolute confusion, eating my brains out and getting ideas in the shower, the past few weeks have been filled with all these emotions.

But first things first, let’s start at the beginning, the Community Bonding

Community Bonding

The official community bonding period started from 2nd May. However for me, community bonding started a bit late. It was a great experience for me. In one word, I can say that the whole community is awesome. I spent a good part of two weeks busy with End Semester exams. The rest of the time, I spent surfing through the codebase, trying to find my way through it. I faced a few issues setting up my environment, but tackled my way through it with the help of my mentors. Some things that I explored:

- Virtual Machine Setup (UTM)
- SSH Remote Tunneling

The community bonding period sailed through as so. The best of the part was yet to come.

Initial Weeks

The Royal Rumble began from 27th May, when the contribution period started. At this point I had never worked with such a large codebase, so I faced many challenges apart from figuring out the code. I had to learn the best practices like writing better commit messages, maintaining branches properly and working parallelly with others. One thing that improved drastically during this period was my git skills.

Then I began with the first major task of my project, which was quite a bit challenging one. I had to figure out an algorithm to pin point the location of a license finding. I was able to write the algorithm and propose the same to the mentors, which seemed to please them. This was the most challenging time for me as I was scared, had a lot of imposter syndrome and did not know whether I will succeed or not. But things changed for the better.

Once, I successfully implemented the line number algorithm and sent out my first PR, the nerves seemed to calm down. I was relaxed and more calm. Then came a boost in productivity. As the tasks continued, more challenges came and went. Most of them, I tried to tackle on my own. I relied heavily on the inputs of mentors for this part. All in all, the hardest part was over now. Some of the learnings from the Initial Weeks:

- Unified diff format (UDF)
- Interactive rebasing in Git
- Modular programming

With this, few weeks passed, I submitted my project reports on the gsoc repo. I started to get more comfortable with my setup and with the community. It was the period of the most learning till now.

Go on a sprint

After a few weeks, I started to enjoy my work quite a lot, the productivity started to increase. At this point, I sent out a few PR’s and got some reviews from my mentors, which was the most helpful part. I attended regular meetings, swept up a weekly schedule and began documenting my progress daily to keep myself on my toes. I wrapped up some major tasks of my project and began researching on the next parts. One thing that really motivated me during this time, was the dedication and determination of my mentors and colleagues alike.

As the days started to pass, I began thinking about the mid term evaluation. I was not worried about the result, I was happy with what I was able to learn and achieve in a relatively short span of time, which I had not previously. During my last meeting, I have started working on a Github Action for fossology, which will seamlessly integrate fossology scanners in any CI workflow. I have also been given the task of naming it. :)

Some learnings from this period

- Runners in CI pipelines
- Emulation in Github Actions and how Gitlab does it out of the box
- Creating and hosting custom Github Actions
- The power of git concepts like tagging ang versioning

As the days come closer, my anxiety and expectations are increasing day by day. Soon we’ll know the results whether we have passed or not, but one thing that I can say for sure is that the past month has been one of the most exciting months of my life!

Some relevant links

  • See my project here
  • See my progress report here
  • Checkout UTM here
  • Learn about SSH Remote Tunneling here
  • Read about unified diff format here
  • Checkout this thread to understand the line number algorithm or checkout this PR#2754
  • Learn about Github Runners here
  • QEMU is used for cross platform emulation. Check it out here
  • Learn about python performance testing here
  • Docker images, volumes, tags, prunes. All these are here
  • Checkout the Github and Gitlab REST API docs and endpoints such as compare and repository
  • Creating and publishing different types of Github Actions.