Summer Coding 2010 proposal - Interactive SPEC pages

About me

1. What is your name?
   • Ionuț Arțăriși
2. What is your email address?
   • mapleoin@fedoraproject.org
3. What is your wiki username?
   • Mapleoin
4. What is your IRC nickname?
   • maploin
5. What is your primary language? (We have mentors who may speak your preferred languages and can match you with one of them if you request.)
   • Romanian. English is fine, thank you.
6. Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)
   • Romania. My working hours vary a lot. Anytime between 6AM and 12PM GMT.
7. Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?
   • User:Mapleoin
   • http://github.com/mapleoin
8. Bonus level: What's your schedule and why?
   • I'm a terminal year college student in Romania where school officially ends in July. Since this is also the year when I have to write my thesis I'd like to deviate from the standard Summer Coding schedule. My first term will be the standard second term and I'll add another term starting from the standard midterm evaluation date. I'm aligning with a few standard dates to try and keep things as simple as possible for others. I can and will probably start working a bit earlier. So it would look like this (11 weeks in total):
     1. First term - 12 July - 16 August (my midterm evaluation date)
     2. Second term - 17 August - 27 September (student final report etc.)

Interactive SPEC pages

Description

1. Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?

Timeline

1. What is the timeline for development of your project? The Fedora Summer Coding work period is 11 weeks long, May 24 - August 9; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (July 5-12); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects that are not mostly working by then.
   • If your project development progresses differently so there is not 90% functionality by the mid-term, you must be in regular contact with your mentor about this. Your mentor must not be surprised about the state of your project when the mid-term comes.
   • If you are not progressed this far in mid-term, you must have a plan with your mentor to fix the situation.

Convincing

Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.

I've been a Fedora Project contributor since May 2008 when I began working on the Fedora PackageDB with Toshio Kuratomi. I worked on small features, visible to the general Fedora user. One of the features I'm most proud of that I worked on in that period was an advanced package search functionality.

Last summer I participated in GSOC working on a bunch of features for the pkgdb aimed at making it more user-centric, rather than developer-centric. These included importing metadata from yum, a new package page with commenting and tags and exporting those tags for future use in yum via sqlite. This work was later adapted and included into the 0.5.x series of the PackageDB after some design changes to PackageDB itself.

At the end of the summer I began interested in Fedora packaging and have contributed this way since then. I've also begun a personal project of a Romanian FOSS advertising network. More info on the project on its webpage (Romanian) or on github (code).

Me and the community

1. If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Fedora community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Fedora community, at least one of whom should be a Fedora Summer Coding mentor. Provide email contact information for non-Summer Coding mentors.
2. What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?
3. In addition to the required blogging minimum of twice per week, how do you propose to keep the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?

Miscellaneous

1. We want to make sure that you are prepared before the project starts
   • Can you set up an appropriate development environment?
   • Have you met your proposed mentor and members of the associated community?
2. What is your t-shirt size?
3. Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.
4. Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?

Note: you will post this application on the wiki in the category Category:Summer Coding 2010 applications. We encourage you to browse this category and comment on the talk page of other applications. Also, others' comments and your responses on the talk page of your own application are viewed favorably, and, while we don't like repetitive spam, we welcome honest questions and discussion of your project idea on the mailing list and/or IRC.

The NeL project has some good general recommendations for writing proposals. We encourage Summer Coding code to include tests.