Summing Up – 2016

How was 2016 to me ?

I always say to my friends that life should be like DSCE (My College) campus. It is full of up’s and down’s since it is constructed on shavige malleshwara hills.

Many things went really well, also few things didn’t go well. But learned more from things which went wrong. It is the hard work and determination which will always help you to succeed.

Inspirational talks by Abdul Kalam, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others made me not to loose my hopes at anytime.

“Learning gives creativity.

  Creativity leads to thinking.

  Thinking provides knowledge.

  Knowledge makes you great!”

– Abdul Kalam

Some of the highlights :

At the beginning of the year, we fought for #Netneutrality #SaveTheInternet. Part of the protest which was conducted on Jan 2nd. Took part in #FreedomHack hackathon.

Hosted DuckDuckGo’s global Quak and Hack.

Started contributing to WikiToLearn, KDE project. Learned more about MediaWiki software.
Workshops at my GLUG.
My biggest dream got fulfilled by participating in Google Summer of Code (2016).
Worked with SwiftCode team to share the knowledge. Teaching students some new technologies.

Currently, mentoring in Google Code-In under KDE organization.

All good. 🙂
Looking for another great year ahead. 🙂
Wish you also a great and prosperous new year. 😀

Mentoring for Google Code-in – WikiToLearn

Google Code-in

Google Code-in has just begun. I’ll be mentoring this time. 🙂

If you know any pre-university students who are interested in computers or open source please do inform them about this. Task varies from coding, documentation, training, outreach, research, quality assurance and user interface. Also, students earn prizes for their successful completion of tasks.

What is Google Code-in ?

Google Code-in is a contest by Google to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Since 2010, over 3200 students from 99 countries have completed work in the contest.

What I’ll be doing ?

I’ll be mentoring for tasks under WikiToLearn, KDE organization.
I have published a task related to WikiToLearn community : What can I do for WikiToLearn

I’ll be helping students with code and design for this task.

I have few other tasks in my mind. I may publish them as we move on (based on our progress).

Why I’m doing this ?

Well, I just love open source and like helping others to get into FOSS. And WikiToLearn, KDE is a great community to work with.
I strongly believe in it’s philosophy – “Knowledge only grows if shared”. It feels good to help the younger generation to get into community so that our community grows big.

Join WikiToLearn now and contribute however you can. 🙂

SwiftCode at BNMIT

Firstly, check out our technology stack :

swift-code4
It is Play framework, REST API, Java, AngularJS, MySQL, we deploy our application on AWS, Heroku. All our development happens over Lubuntu, a lightweight and fast operating system. We make use of Git along with GitHub for version control.

What is SwiftCode ?

SwiftCode program is intended to show a modern age computer science graduate how to build scalable and robust applications using state of the art techniques and design methodologies that have shaped software today.

This blog post beautifully explains how we set up collaborative development environment for our workshop : How to Quickly Set Up Collaborative Software Development Environments

On August 20th, we hosted our first workshop at BNMIT engineering college, Bangalore. We had 25 students from Computer/Information Science department.

On the first and second day, Sandeep and Akshay took the session on Java Play framework, explaining how to build a RESTful application. They completed the backend side of the application. Students were often made to commit and push their code on Github. At the end of day 2, Shrita showed how to test our APIs using the Postman.

On the third day, Prarthana took a session on front-end development, talking about how responsive websites could be built using bootstrap, architecture of Model-View-Controller (MVC) and AngularJS.

At the end of the training, all students were able to build a social media (similar to facebook) application on their own. They had soo much fun and learned a lot.

You can see all the repositories created by them at our GitHub org : https://github.com/swift-code

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Image source : SwiftCode

It’s a great start to our long journey. Keep waiting to know about our next stop! 🙂

[To be continued…]

One last step for completion of Google Summer of Code – KDE – WikiToLearn

One last step for completion of Google Summer of Code – KDE – WikiToLearn

Collaborative Editor Extension for MediaWiki
The Google Summer of Code 2016 is coming to an end, just couple of days left.

The good thing is that I’m also almost done with my project and enjoying my free time. 🙂

I have published the screencast of how my project (Collaborative editor extension) works on my laptop.

YouTube : https://youtu.be/lf1Kg0gVIWk

I had built the extension on normal MediaWiki.
I tested it on my local instance of WikiToLearn i.e http://tuttorotto.biz (URL is accessible only if you are running its local instance)
It works good and as smooth as it was on MediaWiki.

The things I’ve planned to work on these final days are :

* Write good documentation. Since my project was bit complicated, I do feel it requires a good documentation on how does it work, how to use it and configuring it.

* It may need some tweaking on UI so as to match with the current skin of WikiToLearn. It would be easy, we can do it anytime but my focus is on get the collaborative editing work good.

* I’m curious to know how it would perform when we deploy it on staging or production server. I know WikiToLearn will be used by the huge number of people every day and hence it will have high traffic.

I’m also looking for any good tool to write my documentation. Maybe GitHub wiki, ReadTheDocs or a blog post would be fine I think.

Hope all these goes well. 🙂

Cheers!

[Edit]
Testing Rich Elements.

YouTube : https://youtu.be/T3KyDwNi_VM