GSOC 2013/Student Application Sarupbanskota

Contact Information

• Your name: Sarup Banskota
• FAS Account: sarupbanskota
• Fedora userpage: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Sarupbanskota

• Email Address: sbanskota08@gmail.com
• Blog URL: http://thirstyforcola.wordpress.com/category/technology/foss/
• Freenode IRC Nick: banas

Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project?

My prime motivation behind choosing Fedora is the project I've decided to contribute to. It is in line with my summer goals, and is part of the design team. Being a hobby designer myself, I look forward to connecting with other designers, learning new ideas, and closely observing how they work. Furthermore, I am a FOSS fan, and have known Fedora to be a large and diverse organization, doing extensive projects ranging from artwork to robotics. Working with Fedora gives me exactly the kind of experience a student would want – a diverse range of areas to be involved with and learn a strong culture that has existed for a good while and an awesome community. I aspire to become a long-term contributor and learn a lot of values, and these exciting traits should definitely help me fulfill my aspirations.

Do you have any past involvement with the Fedora project or any other open source project as a contributor?

I am new to Open Source, and am really excited about working with Fedora. In the last month or so, I made a couple of small contributions to Mozilla:

1. Built a simple UI for the Mozilla webRTC landing page[1]. The page is responsive, and uses Twitter Bootstrap.

2. I am currently working on improving a patch[2] I wrote for their automation team. It involved improving a testing library written in JavaScript and updating the tests that use it.

Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?

This is my first attempt at GSoC.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2012 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with?

There are a quite a few improvements that would be really nice to have, but might not be within the scope of the coding period. I've also discussed the project with Emily and Mairin, from the Fedora design team, professors from University, and a few other independent designers and developers I know. All of them had valuable suggestions that could make the project more powerful. My first goal after this program would be to implement such improvements.

I have used Fedora and I like it. I wish to learn how kernels are developed and so on. Hopefully, through this summer project, I will interact with people working in varied areas, and learn more. I have subscribed to various mailing lists of TFP. I am open to being assigned any project that matches my skills.

Of course, I will maintain anything I develop, and contribute more wherever I can.

Why should we choose you over other applicants?

I spent a year in University volunteering at FOSS events organized by my seniors. I have been a fan, and am now a dedicated user of FOSS products for all purposes. This summer, I want to give back. While building on skills I already possess, I wish to learn new techniques from fellow contributors. I consider GSoC to be a prestigious learning opportunity, where I can make lifetime connections, and after which I can identify myself as part of an awesome community. I can give 50 hours a week until mid-July, and 40 hours thereafter. There might be a few short breaks in between, I have tried my best to reflect them in the timeline.

Some other relevant points:

1. I am familiar with primary Open Source techniques – issue tracking, mailing lists, basic revision control.

2. I have experience in Object Oriented Programming and Web Technologies. I have worked with C++ and Python, and am currently learning Ruby on Rails.

3. I love to write, and I blog quite often. I believe this will also help me develop an interesting and well laid-out documentation for the project.

4. I started communication about the project quite early, thanks to which my mentor provided me with a good number of resources and services for inspiration. I try to be as self-sufficient as possible and use search engines and mailing lists effectively.

5. I take this program to be just a nice starting point for a long-term connection with a community as vibrant as Fedora.

Links

From Past contributions to Open Source: [1]- http://sarupbanskota.github.io/webrtc-landing/ [2]- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816084