Open Source could easily be a religion. Last year, when I just started contributing to the Open Source community, I could almost sense that I was going to stay. There are several reasons that made me feel so. The first and foremost of them was the fact that I knew how to write code that “Just works”, but that’s not how it should be. I wanted to understand good code from bad code and the only possible way of doing so was to go through numerous code reviews and improve with each iteration. Secondly, it gives a very warm satisfying feeling that you’re doing something for free, for good.

I’ve been working with the Melange team for about a year now, and I started in GSoC ‘13. This year, I’d be participating again in GSoC with them. Most of my efforts are going to be centered around improving developer workflow in Melange. Melange team is evolving. We’ve got 4 different kinds of tests in our test suite now - Functional, PyUnit, Acceptance, JavaScript. And we’d been commiting a lot of code, and sometimes breaking Melange too. The reason behind this was simple - no one wants to run all the tests on their machine all times. The solution to this problem is simple - Run the tests in cloud, and run them everytime a change is pushed to a developer branch. If tests pass, hooray! and if not - no one would ask for a code review of code that fails tests, let alone pushing the code to master. Also, I’m going to focus on a lot of other things, like generating documentation with each build, generating video run of functional tests whenever functional/acceptance tests are run.

Functional tests are the tests that run on a browser. So, every run is potentially a user story and a user manual as to how a task is to be performed. Making those videos available is the best possible way of explaining to anyone how things work etc. This seems like a new way of documenting software behaviour, and I’m excited about it’s future.

Now, I’m also going to work as a Summer Data Scientist Intern with LinkedIn and it might be thought how’d I be able to balance both. That is a fair question. The way I justify this to myself is as follows - I work on Melange stuff on weekends. Even due the course of internship, my weekends would be free. So what’s the harm ?

It’s going to be an awesome summer for sure!