Welcome to GSOC 2021 with XWiki - Sanchita Singh

Development
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Hi Sanchita,

Congratulations on your acceptance into GSoC with the XWiki this year! We’re excited to start working with you on increasing the number of active XWiki installs by leveraging Cloud technologies, and we hope you are too. To kick off the community bonding process, there are a few things I would like to mention, which I’ll keep as brief as I can.

Weekly check-ins:

I’d like to connect with you via video call (you can keep video off if you like :slight_smile: )at least once a week in order to stay updated on your progress and to give you a chance to ask questions. Given our work hours (details below) and the time difference (between Vincent’s timezone and ours ), perhaps something in our morning and your evening would make sense. Thursday and Friday are the best days for me, and I’ll let Vincent say what works best for him. Generally, I expect to stay in regular communication with you about your work, and we expect that you will continue the open contribution style you demonstrated over the last couple of months. If any blockers pop up in your work, open and frequent communication will make dealing with them easier.

Mentors and work hours:

Your mentors are me (Sachin Chopra), and Vincent Massol. Please feel free to reach out to us for advice or assistance! Vincent is the GSoC Org Admin too, in case you have any concerns regarding overall GSoC program. I am in the Insidan Standard Timezone (GMT +5:30 ) only whereas Vincent is in Paris, France. ( GMT +2 )

Working at the XWiki is Vincent’s day job and he is CTO there along with being a best selling Author, and I am a software engineer at Amazon so we’ll be doing all of our GSoC work during regular work hours. A typical work week for me will be Monday through Friday, and I work 8 hours a day. Working on weekends is very rare for me, so I likely won’t respond on Saturdays or Sundays. I tend to start my day around 10 or 11 AM and work into the evening, and I’l let Vincent speak for himself. Of course, things may shift around as we navigate the COVID-19 crisis, and things may come up that affect our work schedules. We expect this may be true for you, too. We’ll do our best to reply to any questions you have within 36 hours. We may also take time off occasionally, which we’ll communicate as necessary.

Technology

We will be focusing on usage of CDK for defining Infrastructure required for installing XWiki along with availability of AWS Marketplace .We’ll be using packer alongside CDK to scale the availability to Azure and GCP too. However, AWS Support is a must for this project.

There are a couple of things other than the ones you propsoed in your proposal. It’d be better if we could somehow include the changes we release with new versions to get directly linked to Xwiki-AWS code to increase the maintainability of the project

If you have any changes to your project that you would like to propose, please feel free to discuss them with me.

Community participation

You already seem to have a pretty good handle on our communication processes (Matrix Chat XWiki, GitHub), so please continue to participate in a positive and inclusive manner! I’ll be setting up our introduction meeting this Friday and will be sending a separate invite link for that. I’d prefer using Google meet for our weekly sync-ups.

Last but not the least, I look forward to working with you on this project in summer and make it a great success.

Cheers,

Sachin

1 Like
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Welcome aboard Sanchita! :slight_smile:

I’ll let you do the video calls (I might participate to some but no on a regular basis). On my side I prefer the chats and forum posts since they’re async and leave a trace for others to see. What’s important for doing collaboration work is that after you do a voice call, you take the time to publish the important results of the calls (doesn’t much, only the salient points); it could be a proposal for something, it could be a roadmap, etc. This allows everyone, including members of the community who do not work full time on xwiki to be able to follow.

It’s very important that all questions you have be asked on public channels (xwiki matrix chat or on forum.xwiki.org) so that the whole community can help answer them. The goal is not to work with the mentors but to work with the community (ideally mentors shouldn’t be needed at all and you should be autonomous, like any of the xwiki committers). So try to not ping people when asking questions since that can lead others to not reply since they’re not pinged :slight_smile: Ofc if you don’t get any answer after a few hours don’t hesitate to ping one of the mentors, since it’s important that you also progress fast.

Regarding Roadmap, what would be ideal would be to do time boxing and do releases on defined days, for example, every 2 weeks. This means creating JIRAs and always planning for the coming 2 weeks, setting a “fix version” for the jira issues taken for the coming 2 weeks. It would be good if you coud start proposing such a roadmap for at least the coming 2 weeks with a target date. Then a few days before the release date, start planning for the next 2 weeks, etc. It’s very important to always release on time. If you’re late on something, you could drop it but you need to release the other parts that were done on that day. This allows others (including me), to test the release and verify the result, and provide feedback. @sachin10101998 would that be ok for you too?

I’m not familiar with the Amazon technologies so I’ll let Sachin drive this part mostly. However I do know XWiki and the dev practices we use so I can definitely help actively on all the other parts :slight_smile:

What’s the most important to me is that at the end of this project, we get something integrated into XWiki’s Maven build and XWiki’s CI (Jenkins) so that when a new version of XWiki is released, it’s made available on the AWS Marketplace (as as minimum and ideally other marketplaces if possible for Azure, etc) as automatically as possible (with minimal maintenance) and maybe also as downloadable images (AMI, etc). As Sachin mentioned, the goal is to reach out to other communities/technologies by using their favorite packaging ways in order to make it easier to use or discover XWiki and thus increase XWiki’s active install base :slight_smile:

Let’s do it!

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Firstly, I would Like to Thank the XWiki community for accepting my proposal and giving me this great opportunity. I am very excited to start working on the project with the aim of increasing the number of active XWiki installs by leveraging Cloud technologies.

Sure, As I mentioned in my proposal I do not have any other commitments during this period so I am fine with the meeting time that will suit you both (Friday morning or evening is fine by me).

sure, I’ll look into it and try to find a way to make this work :slight_smile: .

Yes, of course, I will keep that in mind.

Right now, I don’t have much knowledge on it, But I have already started reading about this.

Thanks again :slight_smile:

Looking forward to have a great learning experience with the community.