Project proposal accepted for GSoC’17

GSoC had always been an unachievable dream for me. After a few months of reduced sleep and increased caffeine, I’m really happy to state that I have been selected to work with coala for GSoC 2017. My project comprises of wrapping third party linters and improving the testing API to yield useful results.

What is Google Summer of Code ?

Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on introducing students to open source software development. Students work on a 3 month programming project with an open source organization during their break from university.

As a part of Google Summer of Code, student participants are paired with a mentor from the participating organizations, gaining exposure to real-world software development and techniques. Students have the opportunity to spend the break between their school semesters earning a stipend while working in areas related to their interests.

About coala

coala is a free and open-source language independent analysis toolkit, written in Python. The primary goal of coala is to make it easier for developers to create rules which a project’s code should conform to.

coala provides a unified interface for linting and fixing code with a single configuration file, regardless of the programming languages used. You can use coala from within your favorite editor, integrate it with your CI, get the results as JSON, or customize it to your needs with its flexible configuration syntax.

My experience with coala so far

I started contributing sincerely in the early week of January. coala is the best newcomer friendly organization that I’ve ever come across. Newcomers are welcomed and guided by our community members and we have an awesome Newcomers Guide to get them started. I seemed to struggle a lot during the initial phase and it took 5 months to get my first difficulty/low Pull Request merged. The first step is always the hardest.

I moved on to accept the challenge of writing a bear and I have not stopped yet. There is always scope of progress when you have awesome maintainers like @Makman2, @jayvdb and all the fellow coalians who review your code. My learning curve has been exponential and programming for coala has become an integral part of my life. Surprisingly, while going the github and gitlab pulse, I found out that I was the most active contributor for the coala-bears and second most active for the dependency_management repository. The overall experience has been outstanding and I thank the entire coala community from the bottom of my heart for keeping me motivated.

What’s more ?

I’m looking forward to having a productive summer with coala and plan to use this blog to post updates and developments. Feel free to contact me for any queries/questions regarding GSoC and I’ll be more than happy to answer them. Thats all folks ! Stay tuned.