It's the GSOC Evaluation Week and it's during this period your fate on the GSOC program lies in the balance of your mentors. They have the final say to show if a contributor is serious or worth the stipend. For sure, I will not want to miss on the opportunity so this week was a crucial one. So enough with the waffling and back to business.   

WHAT DID I ACCOMPLISH THIS WEEK?

Simply put, I didn't do anything significant this week, other from the part I was reading on unit tests and practicing since I have to write a bunch of them at the fall of the evaluation period and beyond. It's 6 weeks already, and I can say I'm on track to completing the core issues needed so I can work on the main module to deploy products automatically on PyPI via Github Actions. Hopefully I get to share some great news after the evaluation period as it's very crucial too

WHAT I LOOK FORWARD TO THE COMING WEEK!

Writing lot's of unit tests, Opening pull requests, getting feedback and corrections from mentors and getting them merged. That's why I'm here in the first place! To improve on myself and the github organization services. Hopefully I'll be able to hit the jackpot and continue with the same zeal regardless of the outcome,
Until then See yaaaaa                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Hello there, It's week 6, And unfortunately, I really do not have too much to say because I'm not feeling too well. I was diagnosed with malaria and I'm still undergoing treatment. But all I can indicate currently now is that I'm recovering and I had a pull request merged.

What did I do this week?

Due to my poor health this week, I wasn't able to proceed normally as I would. But gratefully I'm recovering. The only thing I am sure of that boosted me was having my pull requests merged this week. By next week, I'll be fine by God's grace so that I can proceed with my proposal workflow

What I plan doing next week?

I thank all of my mentors who have patiently been helping me to make the necessary changes. And I've learned a lot from them. They already suggested this week I should split a certain function and then write unit tests. That is my job next week before the evaluation period begins. Until then, ciao

Oh well, It's your boy Hanslett again with another GSOC blog post. This week was full of ups and downs but I would say it was a good week. Here is a small recap of what I'll be sharing today

RECAP FOR THE WEEK

1. Server failure and deprecation of python 2.7

In python Argentina's official repository, there is a python 2.7 test that runs in our Github actions that is required to test some web services running on python 2.7. Unfortunately, Github officially deprecated the support for python 2,7. And this has pushed the owners of the projects to reconsider supporting python 2.7. While the builds for python 2.7 was failing, another crucial web server failed. The web server in charge to host the digital certificates. It also contained the certificates used for testing the overall functionality. With the failure from this web server, it means the overall testing functionality for the whole project failed. And this slowed down the overall progress of some of the PR's I was working on

2. Creating new PR's

Yes, you read that right! Creating a new PR was an issue. Week 3, I mentioned I was working on a draft PR that solved about 2 issues. But my mentors insisted I separate my new PR's into their separate PR so It can easily be tracked. This wasn't easy as I had already squashed most of the commits. And I was advised to use max 3 commits per PR to make things look cleaner. This particular step helped me appreciate what it means to actually make a good PR. Good PR's are not about the number of commits, it's rather about how organized and simple the commits are. Making a minor change like fixing an indentation is a commit which has no significant improvement to the overall structure. This is a lesson I learned from one of my mentors!

There's much to say about this week, but I might Cap a lot and spoil the fun for next week. So just chill and wait for me next week for more details!!! Until then, See ya

Hello guys, it's another week, and finally, things went in the right direction. Last week, I was frustrated with the number of bugs that kept popping up while trying to prepare my draft PR. But this week, Thanks to the great help from my mentors, I was able to resolve all those bugs and made significant progress. Let me share a brief story about what happened.

WHAT WAS DONE THIS WEEK?

So here is a detail description of what I was trying to solve. PyAfipWs signs digital certificates for their web services. Now the module has some legacy code for backward compatibility for lower versions of python and verbose languages. Recently, the cryptography module made some significant changes in how the sign digital certificates. Some work was already done by another part time commuter from PyCon. But it worked only on higher versions of python but not backward compatible. My job was to write a solution that could both use the new method of signing certificates and also retain backward compatibility(at least for the moment). Now how the initial solution used to work was first by allocating a buffer memory and signing that certificate. But with the new PKCS7 method, that part of creating a memory allocation was handled. But python2.7 hasn't received any cryptography updates since cryptography 3.4.7 meanwhile the latest version as of this post is V41.0,1. After multiple iterations, I was able to come up with a solution to solve this and thanks to the help of one of the mentors, I passed all the build tests.

WHAT WILL I DO THIS WEEK?

This week, My target will be to have 3 PR's merged including the one I was working on this week. And also start documenting the Github actions workflow for building PyAfipWs Web Service Installers.

But Until then, See y'all next week

It's week three, and things are not looking too good on my side. I have not yet been able to have even one PR merged. This is very worrying as it could affect my evaluation period. Here is a brief explanation of how my week 3 went

What did I do this week?

This week continues from where I left off, and that was working on upgrading the cryptography module of the web services of PyAfipWs. But unfortunately, One of the build processes kept failing on python2.7. This was particularly annoying as I was looking forward to finally merging my first PR!

A hurdle keeps appearing after every success

I was this close to merging the pull request. But one of the builds kept failing on python2.7. Worst case is I was reminded by my mentors again for the third week to write my blog post. Which is quite bad and I have to rectify. But back to the main discussion. They are 5 checks before a PR is merged to the main branch. I passed 4 and failed 1 which is to test the build on python2.7. Worst case is the test just fails unexpectedly without any proper error message even after adding debug flags when testing

What is coming next?

The GSOC evaluation period is fast approaching. And without a PR merged, I think I must complete at least 2 PR's this week. Secondly I need to start working on the next implementation for our Github actions auto release deploy. I hope the next time I'm writing an Article, It should be full of Good news!

Until next week, Have a great day