Community Bonding Period

Community Bonding Period was a really great period to get familar with the project and the community. I hope by the time you are reading this piece you would have known what my project was, if you don’t then you can always get back to this page.

This is the time of May 2022, and we have still some days left for the coding period to begin. Community Bonding period has been intentionally put up by Google into the program to help students get introduced to the community, before the coding period begins. More than coding GSoC puts efforts into building an ecosystem of open source developers. This program values communication and ethics more than anything else. It is the right time for contributors to get aquainted to the culture of the organisation they are working for, how things get to work, and plan out things well in advance.

During this one month, I got up and running with my dev environment. I also completed all the formal obligations I was supposed to do as a part of the Google Summer of Code program. I did a bit of experiments to test the package, and found possible ways to implement things I had mentioned in my proposal. I got in touch with my mentors, got admitted into their slack channel. My mentors set up the schedule for a weekly call, and also the agenda for the first meet. I spent some time exploring OBIS, reading its manual, exploring its webpage and even read a paper utilising data taken from OBIS.

Meanwhile during the community bonding period, IOOS had a summit with the DMAC community. Although I wasn’t able to participate in the summit because of my stark timezone difference (of +9:30 hours). But we had sent a small blurb of my project for it to be presented by one of my mentors. I’m sure it would have been a really great summit. Likewise I had to miss another summit with the DMAC community just because of the timezone. But I am sure the next time it happens in October/September, I’ll try my best to attend it (I am willing to wake up one night for it). It was interesting yet dissapointing to know that we had just two selections from our college this year and I am one of them.

Although, I couldn’t utilise much of the community bonding peroid to its true potential. But it was a lot of fun, and I did cover all that was missing during the coding period itself. GSoC is really mesmerizing, for sure!