Google Summer of Code
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a globally held program, where Google introduces select student developers to open source software development. Students are offered stipends to work on an open-source project under the guidance of project mentors for a period of three months. More about this program can be found here.
I participated in this program as a student developer twice - in 2012 and 2013. Overall, the program was an invaluable experience for me in terms of exposure towards understanding how large organizational codebases work and appreciating the importance and need for the free and open-source software movement. After graduation, I participated in the GSoC program as a mentor for three students during 2014-2015, for organizations under the Python Software Foundation umbrella.
2012 - SYSTERS
In 2012, as a junior year undergraduate student, I was accepted into GSoC to develop code for the Systers community. Systers is an electronic mailing list for women in computing which uses its own heavily customized version of the GNU Mailman software. Started in 1987 by Anita Borg, Systers is a part of the Anita Borg Institute which hosts the annual Grace Hopper Conference as well as the Women of Vision awards (Fun Fact: Systers actually stands for Systems+Sisters!).
My project involved implementing the following items:
Adding a user interface module for administrators:
Mailing lists have administrators, however, there was no proper user interface for admins, and my project involved implementing some front-end interactive features for them.
Saving essays into the database for future perusal:
Users have to submit a personal essay while signing up to Systers, to explain their reasons for joining the list. At that point in time, these essays were reviewed by admins but were never saved for future editing or use by the Syster.
Enabling unsubscribes to email threads without moderator intervention:
Anytime a user wanted to unsubscribe from the mailing list, they had to send an email with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line. These emails were intercepted by an administrator who then had to manually remove that user from the list. I modified the code such that upon intercepting an unsubscribe request, the user was automatically removed.
Adding a user interface module to toggle between dynamic lists.
Fixing a range of additional bugs.
Thorough unit testing via in-depth use cases, automation and integration testing.
TECHNOLOGY
Python, Django, HTML, CSS, PostgreSQL, Bazaar (Version Control)
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2013 - GNU MAILMAN
In my senior year (2013), I worked for Google as a student developer again, this time for the GNU Mailman project. GNU Mailman is a popular free and open-source mailing list management software (a customized version of which I worked on for Systers in 2012).
Mailman 2 had an antiquated user interface - this was especially true when users wanted to change their mailing list settings for individual lists that they were subscribed to. For example, any time a user was going on a holiday, and wanted to disable mail delivery for 3 lists, the user would have to login to a single mailing list, change delivery settings for that list, log out, and login to another list and do the same, and so forth. One can see how this can become extremely tedious especially if the user is subscribed to a large number of mailing lists.
The figure below displays the original mailman interface, where I logged in to the mailman-developers list, and I can look at and modify settings for that list alone.
However, Mailman 3.0 was about to be released, and there were opportunities to create a better user experience with respect to list settings. My proposal was to redesign the user settings interface for Postorius, the web interface for Mailman 3.0.
This redesign required the user to only login once, and access the settings for all their mailing lists in one single place, instead of accessing settings for each list individually. I implemented changing the list settings in 3 ways - GLOBAL preferences (which allowed the user to set their preferences globally), SUBSCRIPTION based preferences (which allowed the user to adjust preferences on a list by list basis), and the ADDRESS based preferences (which allowed the user to adjust preferences based on the email addresses attached to their account). My project was merged into production.
The figure below displays the new mailman interface, with my changes, such as the ADDRESS based preferences. In the figure, there are columns for my different email addresses, and rows for the range of mailing list settings adjustable for each email.
TECHNOLOGY
Python, Django, Bootstrap CSS Framework, Bazaar (Version Control)
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Based on this project, I gave a talk on Django Formsets at DjangoCon Europe 2014, held in France.