Community Bonding Period
After the results were declared for the program, community bonding period had started.
Community Bonding is roughly a four week period lasting till 14th May. This period is dedicated to interact more with the organisation’s community. The accepted students start to get familiar with the organisation’s codebase and developers. This phase is intended to help students get ready to contribute when the coding period starts. The students are introduced and get to know their mentors and accomplices who will work with them for the months to follow.
In my case, our mentors discussed the project’s architecture and development process that will be followed. I also discussed certain attributes of my proposal in detail to make a solid project plan. The project was divided into several modules and tasks were divided among us.
I got welcome mails from Debian community and Google Summer of Code team which made me excited to start working on the project. I made myself familiar with some technologies which were required by our project.
We had a call on Jitsi to further discuss our ideas and set milestones. We were recommended some mailing lists and IRC channels like Debian-outreach, Debconf-discuss and Debian-announce to communicate with other students and Debian mentors. I updated my development environment and booted Debian Stretch.
Chat Preferences! 😀
The key for progress here was participation in Mailing Lists/IRC and becoming familiar with the community practices.
For managing the project, Redmine was chosen which is an open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It could track the number of hours, tasks, issues, bugs and the contribution done by student.
For version control, it was decided to use Salsa, a Debian development platform based on Gitlab. It was decided to have weekly calls and share our updates and issues we faced. We were advised to document our work by submitting weekly reports on Outreach mailing list and updating our progress on Redmine.
During the bonding period, I also got the opportunity to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018, held in Copenhagen. I have written my experience about it in previous blog post.