Hey,
I can believe it’s over. This Summer passed way too fast! It was a great opportunity of learning more about free software development, programming, and GNOME.
To describe and evaluate my Google Summer of Code, I have chosen an interview-style post. I think this is the most efficient way of describing my internship experience.
What do you consider the best aspect of participating in GSoC?
The satisfaction of feeling part of something bigger than yourself. To work side-by-side with people really engaged in software development.
What do you consider the most challenging part of your internship?
Definitely it was conciliating the program with my university duties, since it’s not summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Although getting familiar with large projects, such as Tracker, was hard as well.
How was your mentor?
Cosimo is a great person and has been a great mentor. He has been patient in leading me to the right direction, pointing me what to do, and teaching me what was needed.
What would you do different if you could do it again?
It’s easy to point mistakes but they are part of the learning process. You got to learn from your mistakes to not repeat them.
I could have started my work in Documents UI sooner to have more time to polish/enhance/improve it. Also, I could have asked [more] for help and completed the Tracker task in lesser time.
Which tips would you give to future students?
- Ask for help/tips/advice. I’ve lost a lot of time in tasks that my mentor could answer in seconds. 🙂
- Attend GUADEC!
- Show your code!
What one thing did the GNOME community do that you consider very helpful for your project and would suggest they continue to do?
Incentivate interns to attend GUADEC. It is an environment of creativity and innovation which certainly will inspire students to get involved even more with the community.
Removable-devices support in Documents
The original proposal was: “To make GNOME Documents able to manage and view files on plugged in removable devices. Including extending Tracker to provide the APIs we need to implement the feature.”
What has been achieved?
Tracker:
The ‘IndexFileForProcess‘ API method has been created. It lets client-applications call Tracker to index files/directories/mount-points transparently on an application basis (you can read more about it in my last report). This mechanism works nicely for what we want in Documents.
Documents:
Documents is able to recognize a plugged-in removable device, create a ‘virtual’ collection containing all the documents inside the device.
What was left behind?
- Users should be able to Import files from removable devices to the local disk.
- An already imported document shouldn’t be imported again.
Software is never done! So I’m committing myself to getting these things [gnome] done. 🙂
What’s next?
In addition to finish what’s left in my task, I want to apply for a GNOME Foundation membership, and keep contributing to GNOME.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the GNOME community for helping students get involved with free software development, Google for giving me the opportunity of work with GNOME, Cosimo Cecchi for guiding me in my project, and you for reading this long report. 🙂
Cheers!
Felipe.