GSOC 2015/Student Application aaboouelhamayed

• Your name: Ahmed AbouElhamayed
• FAS Account: aaboouelhamayed
• Fedora userpage: User:Aaboouelhamayed

Contact Information

• Email Address: alwahsh.ahmed@gmail.com
• Blog URL: https://ahmedabouelhamayed.wordpress.com/tag/fedora/
• Freenode IRC Nick: TheMonster

NOTE: We require all students to blog about the progress of their project. You are strongly encouraged to register on the Freenode network and participate in our IRC channels. For more information and other instructions contact Org Admins.

Why do you want to work with the Fedora Project?

Because I liked the idea of their project Design/GlitterGallery as I've been looking forward to contributing to something similar to Github without creating a useless clone of Github. Once I saw GlitterGallery, I knew that this project is what I was looking for. I've also liked the community of GlitterGallery and I wish to be part of it.

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

Yes. I've developed a web app for KDE that collects and displays reports about the activity of their projects[1]. I'm currently the maintainer of that project.
I've also sent a few PRs to some gems that I used and found problems with or improvements opportunities. I've even sent a PR to the Rails project.
I've also contributed to the GlitterGallery project over the past few weeks[2]. I've fixed bugs, added new features, increased test coverage and refactored parts of the code to use best practice.

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

Yes. I was a GSoC student with KDE in GSoC 2013 and GSoC 2014.

Will you continue contributing/ supporting the Fedora project after the GSoC 2015 program, if yes, which team(s), you are interested with?

Yes, I'm planning to continue contributing to and maintaining GlitterGallery after GSoC. I also hope to get involved with other parts of the Fedora project with time. Websites team seems the right one for me.

Why should we choose you over other applicants?

• I believe I'm currently very familiar with the codebase. I've already submitted lots of PRs to GlitterGallery that got merged and that affected almost all parts of the project. Approximately 2k lines have been added/modified by me till now.
• 2+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails and Git.
• I have dealt heavily with Git repositories handling through rails apps in my project with KDE[1].
• I love testing. I've actually submitted tests with all my modifications to GlitterGallery code. A large percent of the tests that reside in GlitterGallery's repository were written by me(and more is yet to come as I want to get to full test coverage before GSoC coding period starts.) I've learned the importance of testing by making the mistake of not testing the code I wrote at the beginning of my rails life so I know how bad it is to not test.
• I know how to test complex projects. My project with KDE required mocking many services and preparing certain conditions for the tests. This introduced me to lots of gems used for testing and taught me lots of techniques for testing. Luckily, I used RSpec and Capybara which are used in GlitterGallery.
• I know how to deal with version control. This doesn't only mean that I can design a good application for collaboration between designers, but also that I follow a good workflow in my contribution to the project, using the advantages of version control.
• I try to follow best practice when possible. I've refactored some parts of GlitterGallery and planning to continue with that. This provides better code readability and easier modification. For example, I try to write a comment above each method I define and try to keep methods in their appropriate places.
• I am planning to continue maintaining GlitterGallery after GSoC. I'm actually looking forward to becoming part of GlitterGallery's team.

[1] KDE Reports

[2] My merged PRs to GlitterGallery

Proposal

The problem

Lots of work has been done in the past couple of years to produce a web app that is similar to Github but intended for designers. The idea is that coders have lots of tools to help collaboration and coordination. On the other hand, designers don’t have much tools like that. They depend mainly on mailing lists for coordination which is not the best way. Designers need to have tools that would allow for better collaboration and coordination and thus would allow them to work more comfortably and open wider areas for inspiration and creativity. More comfortable designers would mean even better looking software which would make everyone happier. Work on the tool that would ease that, Glitter Gallery, has started but it’s not yet complete. We still have no running instance used in production.

The solution

It’s time to get Glitter Gallery ready for production and extend it with more features that would allow it to do what it’s intended for. I’d like to work on adding more features and improving the current features we have to get Glitter Gallery ready for production and attractive to designers. I’m looking forward to having a reasonable number of designers using Glitter Gallery as their tool for sharing and collaborating by the end of summer.

Benefits to the community

• A ready to use web application that helps designers.
• Ability to do your work locally then push to Glitter Gallery using Git without the need for the web interface.
• Easy integration with Sparkleshare.
• Public gallery so that everyone can watch the awesome designs without having to login with full control of who’s allowed to view and/or comment.
• Better commenting system so that designers can get appropriate and detailed feedback on their designs to produce even better designs.
• Enhanced view of the history of designs with discussions so that people can follow what happened and how the current design was reached.
• Support Github hosted repos + Ability to integrate your project with an external bug tracker like Bugzilla and Github if you don’t want to use the internal issues.
• A reputation system for encouraging users to participate and give opinions.

Bonus features

• IRC Bot to announce notifications to certain channels and to do modifications through IRC.
• Add support for Gists.
• An admin panel for controlling Glitter Gallery in an easy intuitive way.
• API to allow others to integrate with Glitter Gallery.
• A simple Android application for Glitter Gallery.