Welcome for GSoC 2020!

Dear Abdallah,

Congratulations for being elected for GSoC [1].  Your project goal for
this summer (until end of August) is the integration of JSON encoding
and decoding into core Octave.

Ankit Raj and Sebastian Schöps are your co-mentors this summer, your
primary mentor will be me (Kai Torben Ohlhus).  Basically, most of the
communication shall happen in public on this mailing-list.  Please ask
whatever you like to know, we are happy to guide you.  Do not be
disappointed, if a reply of either of us might take up to one day.  Most
of us live and work in different time zones, for example, and are
working full-time next to contributing to the Octave project.

All May is intended to be the community bonding period.  This means, we
use this time to take care of all organizational questions towards an
successful GSoC-project of yours.

As a first step, please read carefully the student guide [2] and setup a
public blog (e.g. blogger [3], wordpress [4], ...) and send us the URL.
 I will syndicate it on Planet Octave [5].  Also, please give me a
preferred image to use as your "face" to identify you in syndication.
In the past years each GSoC student working on Octave reported there at
least weekly about their achievements, problems, and remaining work to
do.  This also helps you to structure your work and I think we should
continue this "tradition".


On 5/5/20 6:51 AM, Abdallah Elshamy wrote:
> I think that submitting a patch or solving a bug will be helpful to get
> more involved during the community bonding phase. If that is best thing
> to do, Can you please recommend me something to work on ? (I submitted
> the patches [6] & [7]. But, all my submissions were small patches and I
> think working on a medium one will be beneficial during the community
> bonding phase.)
> If you think doing something else right now is better, please let me
> know what to do.


Regarding your question.  [7] is already merged with Octave core, thank
you for that contribution.  I can take a look at [6].  But for now, you
should focus on realizing and describing your JSON project.  This
especially means, that you get familiar with the codebase of Octave.
Where to find functions, how to add libraries, how to compile it, how to
test for regressions that come up with changes you did?

Finally, our main goal is to attract you to become a regular contributor
to Octave, even after GSoC is over.  This is what had happened to me
;-).  Please let us know about any obstacles towards this goal.

Kai


[1] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/projects/#6263027378159616
[2] https://google.github.io/gsocguides/student/
[3] https://www.blogger.com/
[4] https://wordpress.com/
[5] https://planet.octave.org/

[6] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57699
[7] https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?57041