In this post I will be describing week-0:Community Bonding period of my GSoC’14 with phpMyAdmin. Technically speaking, we cannot call it a week because it is way longer than just a week, but for the sake of uniformity, I am calling it so. ;-)
From 21st April to 4th May is the community bonding period in my GSoC’14 project. According to the actual timeline given by Google, community bonding period is from 21st April to 19th May. But because I was facing this problem of working from two countries I had to reschedule the project. See, the problem is that in First week of August I will be moving to US for my Masters (Yes, I have an admit from USC for MS in CS. 8-) ). So, the last two weeks of my GSoC project were coinciding with it. According to VISA rules of F1, I can not work on GSoC project while on US soil (at least for the first 9 months). Thanks to Madhura Parikh, I found a way out. I rescheduled the project so that it gets finished while I’m in India only. So, I prepared the new schedule and asked Michal Čihař (my project mentor) about rescheduling. Fortunately, he approved my request. Thank you, Michal for the kind cooperation. And so from then on I started working according to the new schedule. My revised schedule is available online, have a look at it at:Revised Schedule. It has the same number of tasks as proposed in my actual GSoC proposal but they are rearranged so as to complete two weeks earlier.
During the community bonding period, I was supposed to do some formalities like submission of tax forms and Payoneer account registration. I completed them successfully and in time. Apart from that, I blogged about my project. I familiarized myself with the phpMyAdmin community and my mentor too. I also got to know some of the fellow GSoC’14 students from India and around the globe via GSoC student mailing list. It is great to be in the network of such talented people. Also I read the source code of phpMyAdmin, especially the PMA_Error and PMA_Error_Handler classes as they are important for my project. From the study I did of those classes, I will need to build on those classes only. No need for creating something new, only extending them will suffice.
In the last week, I received a welcome package from Google (a package directly from Mountain View, California. :-D ). It had a diary and a pen which had GSoC’14 printed on it. Also it had some of those GSoC’14 stickers. I have been using them to flaunt my GSoC’14 project. ;-)
Anyway, I will start the actual developments on the project from next Monday, 5th of May.
Looking for a great summer of coding ahead. :-)
NOTE: I was actually planning to add this post in the previous week, but because I was busy with my final college exams I could not get the time to write it.
