Weekly Check-In #1

Hello everyone!!

I am Akshay Sharma, a final year undergrad at Jaypee Institute Of Information Technology, India and a senior certificate student at University Of Florida, USA, majoring in Computer Science. With immense pleasure, I would like to mention that this summer, I will be contributing to "Scrapy Community" under Python Software Foundation, as a GSoC Student. I will be designing a python library for MIME(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) Sniffing.

What did you do this week (community bonding period)?

The bonding period went well, I got to interact with my highly experienced mentors (Eugenio Lacuesta, Adrian Chaves) through video conferencing. I have known them for a year through Github but meeting them face-to-face for the first time was great and I found them friendly & helpful. We discussed the overall timeline, the implementation details and other requirement necessary for my project. Besides bonding period, I spent most of the time reading documentation and understanding the codebase of other MIME sniffing libraries like mimetypes, python-magic. This helped to get a gist of what I will be working on throughout the GSoC program. I also got a name for my library which is xtractmime.

What is coming up next?

The coding period has started! and I will be designing the high level API for my MIME sniffing library this week. The API will take HTTP response as input and will return a mimetype as output.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I got stuck a little while deciding a starting point for the library as unlike other projects, I will be creating a library from scratch. After a discussion with mentors, we finalised the necessary inputs for the API so that later there will be less trouble making the changes and also helped me to start with the coding.