Contact Information
- Your name: Sarup Banskota
- FAS Account: sarupbanskota
- Fedora userpage: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Sarupbanskota
- Email Address: sbanskota08 AT gmail DOT 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 to choose Fedora is the Design team project I've decided to contribute to. It is in line with my summer goals, and being a hobby designer myself, I look forward to connecting with other designers to discover new ideas, and observe how they work. Furthermore, I'm a FOSS fan, and have known Fedora to be a large and diverse organization, doing extensive projects ranging from artwork to robotics.
Being a student new to Open Source, I look forward to being involved with an organization which has an exciting culture and community. I aim to stick around and become a long term contributor across diverse areas, and Fedora gives me exactly the opportunity.
Past involvement with Fedora/Open Source
Since I am new, I don't have any major contributions yet. In the last month or so, I did a couple of small contributions to Mozilla:
- Built a simple UI for the Mozilla webRTC landing page. The page is responsive, and uses Twitter Bootstrap.
- I'm currently working on improving a patch. I wrote for their automation team. It involved improving a testing library written in JavaScript and updating tests that use it.
I'm really excited about starting my Open Source adventures with Fedora. As a starting point, I have made around 5 patches to the summer project I want to work on.
Did you participate with the past GSoC programs, if so which years, which organizations?
No. This is my first attempt at GSoC.
Contribution to Fedora post GSoC
There are quite a few improvements on this summer project 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 (User:Emichan) and Máirín (User:Duffy), from the Fedora design team, professors from University, and a few other independent designers and developers I know personally. 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 use Fedora and I love it. Once I do some more reading on Operating Systems, I would want to explore further. Hopefully, through this summer project, I will interact with people working in varied areas, and make useful contacts who'll help me and introduce me to interesting projects by Fedora. As an attempt to stay updated, I follow Fedora's various mailing lists regularly. 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 choose me
I spent the previous term in University volunteering at FOSS events organized by my seniors. I have been a fan, and now a dedicated user of FOSS products for all purposes. This summer, I want to give back. While building on skills I already have, I want to learn more from people from the vibrant Fedora community. 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 a team whose products I constantly use. I can give 50 hours a week to the project until mid-July, and 40 hours thereafter. I might have to take a few very short breaks in between, but I have tried my best to reflect them in the timeline.
Some other relevant points:
- I am familiar with primary Open Source techniques – issue tracking, mailing lists, basic revision control.
- Have used mercurial and bugzilla for working on patches for Mozilla. For a few personal projects, I have used Git.
- I have experience in Object Oriented Programming and Web Technologies. I have worked with C++ and Python, and am currently learning Ruby on Rails. I have built decent websites, and possess good design skills.
- I love to write, and I blog quite often. I believe this will also help me develop interesting and well laid-out documentation for the project.
- I started communication about the project quite early, thanks to which my prospective 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.
- I take this program to be a nice starting point for a long-term connection with the Fedora community.
Links
From Past Involvements with Fedora / Open Source:
[1]- http://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/