Community Bonding Period
Hello everyone, hope this blog finds you well.
As Google Summer Of Code’23 has begun with a blast, here we are at the end of the Community Bonding Period.
This period is a process where newly selected contributors are welcomed within the community and given an idea about how Google runs GSoC.
In the start of this period, there was an introductory meet with Google admins who explained us about the program and the various key factors that lead to a successful project. It was followed by a contributors summit where mentors and past GSoC’ers gave speeches. Although I started this phase a little late because of my ongoing endsemester exams, I have thoroughly enjoyed this phase .
Here is some of the work I did during this period -
- Prerequisites
- Check my existing setup for SymPy and run tests successfully.
- Built the documentation and ran the html pages on a live server.
- Set up this blog, a necessary component requested by Aaron Meurer.
- Meeting with Mentors
- This was my first live interaction with Nikhil and Smit, my mentors for this project.
- An important sub-topic we discussed was the time I would have to devote weekly towards this project. As a result of my next academic semester beginning just after the mid term evaluation I thought it will be better if I could extend my project from 12 weeks to 16 weeks ,and my mentors didn’t have any issues with that.
- We planned to setup a communication channel soon and decided a time for our weekly meetings.
- Starting the Project
- To be honest with the readers, I had prepared this proposal a long time ago (about a year ago) when I had my Signals and Systems course. At that time the ideas for my proposal came naturally to me. But as time went by I have forgotten stuff about control systems and it’s concepts. I went through the SymPy documentation and wil need to read continuously as I code in parallel.
- Other than that I started brainstorming ideas, which I will communicate to my mentors when the coding period starts.I made 4-5 Github Gists which do not have polished code but instead have chunks of ideas to build upon. You can go through them here - Github Gist
- Minor Change in Control Plots Documentation #25147
- Remove unused test variable from test_control_plots #25161
All and all it was a very useful phase of me. It helped me to settle in the SymPy community as a contributor, make new connections and increase my network in the open source space.