This summer, I am participating in Google Summer of Code, working on the Book management project for Wikbooks/Wikisource under Wikimedia with my mentors Raylton P. Sousa and Thomas PT. As the community bonding period is nearing its end, I think now is the best time for a blog-post about my experience with the program till now.

I was introduced to GSoC by my seniors at SDSLabs and especially to Wikimedia by Aarti Dwivedi who had worked with Mediawiki during GSoC 2013.

Wikimedia is a huge organization both in terms of its code-base as well as developer community and people here are very encouraging towards newbies. I started with reading about ways to contribute to Mediawiki. Then I submitted patches for a few easy bugs and got a little comfortable with the code. I chose Book management from the list of proposed projects and drafted my proposal with Raylton’s help. After that I started working on bugs related to my project. Whenever I fixed even an easiest bug, I felt great about having contributed something. I almost always found instant help whenever needed and that’s what I loved the most about being involved with an open-source community.

I was ecstatic when my proposal was accepted. We decided to use the pre-code time for properly planning our work. Raylton has been extremely supportive. We have tried to organize our ideas and decide what is most important and what can be left for later, finalized mock-ups, technical details and timeline of the project. Our main aim is to get Bookmanagerv2 extension functioning and deployable. We have also thought of a lot of cool features to implement after that.

I am very excited to work on this project. I hope we find enough time to implement most of our ideas.